


Urdowyr

by Avatar_Stark



Series: The Galaxiad Trilogy [1]
Category: HFY - Fandom, Humanity Fuck Yeah - Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Alien Planet, Barsoomian, F/M, HFY, Lost Astronaut, Low Gravity Means Humans Are Super Strong, Planetary Romance, Science Fantasy, Space Orcs vs. Space Elves, Sword & Planet, humanity fuck yeah
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 38,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25774942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avatar_Stark/pseuds/Avatar_Stark
Summary: In the year 2041, Dr. Henry "Hank" Swanson accompanies the third manned mission to Mars. He's a linguist, tasked with translating petroglyphs found on alien ruins. But he never expected that an unknown technology hidden in those ruins would teleport him to the other side of the galaxy. Now stranded on the ancient, deadly, low-gravity planet of Urdowyr, he falls in with a primitive tribe of orc-like humanoids. But all he really wants is to seek out more ruins and hopefully find his way home…
Relationships: Human Male/Alien Female
Series: The Galaxiad Trilogy [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1907479
Comments: 40
Kudos: 14





	1. Martian Horizon

> **Wednesday, February 13th, 2041**   
>  **IPV-102 _Athena_ , NASA EM-Drive Interplanetary Vehicle**   
>  **Day 68 of the third manned spaceflight to Mars**

Dr. Henry Swanson grumbled in annoyance. His coffee was starting to _float_ up and out the straw of its plastic pouch—and his iPage, a flexible computer not much thicker than a few ordinary sheets of paper, was starting to float up off his lap. It was bothersome enough having to contend with haptic holograms in place of a physical keyboard—since, after all, every last gram of mass counted when it came to propulsion from the _Athena's_ reactionless drive—but now Hank found his flimsy excuse for a personal computer trying to defy the bonds of gravity itself.

Or rather, everything around Hank, himself included, was starting to feel less _weighted down_ , which could only mean one thing: at long last, the _Athena_ was nearing its destination.

The enormous wheel-shaped craft had been rocketing along its silent way to Mars for more than two months now, and for most of that time, the wheel had been spinning about its central axis (a cigar-shaped tube, more conventionally "rocket-like" in appearance, which housed the command module, the lander and its fuel tanks, the power generator, and the conical cavity of the ship's primary reactionless EM-drive). The thrust to create that spin came courtesy of a set of four smaller EM-drives, positioned equidistantly about the ring's outer hull; but now that the _Athena_ was getting ready to settle into Martian orbit, those small engines would be pointed in the opposite direction and used to cancel out the ship's spin—and with it, the centrifugal force that had served the _Athena's_ crew as artificial gravity for the past sixty-five days or so.

But EM-drives did not produce a great deal of thrust—their advantage was in the lack of need for massive fuel reserves—and so the artificial gravity would slowly peter out over the course of the next two or three days.

The intercom built into the wall of Hank's bunkroom crackled for a second before the voice of Col. Lenkov, the mission commander, came through loud and clear: "Hey Doc—can you give me a hand in the No. 4?"

Hank, who had been resting cross-legged in his bunk, set aside his iPage, pinched the straw of the coffee-pouch closed, and crossed the room over to the intercom. (There was still "gravity" enough that Hank himself didn't float—rather, he covered the distance in one light, bounding step.) "I'm busy, Pyotr. What is it?"

"Just come."

Hank thought that he could sense a hint of levity in the colonel's voice. (That was unsettling: a Russian with a sense of humor.) "Can't it wait? I think I'm close to cracking another set of morphemes—"

"You still have three days to work on your _proklyatym_ translation, Hank! Get over here now!"

Stifling an irritated groan, Hank yanked open the door and headed out into the corridor, still in his boxers and stocking feet. (The _Athena_ was an impressively large craft, not at all cramped for space, but with only three crewmen stuck together on the same boat for two months, formalities were the first thing to go _out_ as the cabin fever settled _in_.) "This had better not be another damned practical joke, Pete!"

* * *

The Number 4 Module, one of twelve that made up the _Athena's_ outer ring, served as the ship's mess hall. It was smaller than the interior of a Winnebago, and the amenities for cooking and eating were similarly compact. The _Athena_ was a state-of-the-art spacecraft, though, and everything inside it, including the kitchen, was bright, white, made of ultra-light plastics, and totally cutting-edge.

When Hank arrived, he found Pyotr seated at the small table, staring intently as powdered flakes of chocolate something-or-other drifted up out of a silvery packet. The colonel was a tall man, 6'6" if he was an inch, built like a gym-rat, with his graying hair worn in a proper military crew-cut.

"Where's Em?" asked Hank. Captain Emily Nguyen was the _Athena's_ pilot, and their only other crewmate.

"She's in the command module, making our final course-corrections," answered Pyotr, not looking away from the floating flakes. "That's why I called you here. Look out there."

The Number 4 was one of the few modules in the ring-section that had a full-sized window pointed in the same direction that the ship was moving—but there hadn't been much to see for most of the voyage, thanks to the _Athena's_ slingshot trajectory. Now, though, Hank obliged the colonel and looked: there was a goodly-sized pinkish blob in the middle of the window—impossible to resolve into the dot that it should have been, since the craft was still spinning at a breakneck clip, but there was no mistaking what it was.

"That's Mars," said Hank, more than a little awestruck.

"You bet your ass," said Pyotr, his Russian accent somehow getting even thicker in that moment. "It was time you looked up from your books and saw where we are going!"

Hank looked away from the window and fixed his gaze on the colonel, meeting him eye-to-eye. "The translation is important. It's the whole reason for the mission!"

" _Nyet_ ," scoffed Pyotr. "The reason for the mission is because the human race can't—how you say?—get its 'shit' together. One last shot to save the planet—from _us_." The colonel then barked a sudden, hollow laugh and slapped Hank hard on the back. "Forget me. I am Russian—we are gloomy by nature. Anyway, you spend too much time with your books and languages!"

"I'm a _linguist_."

"Then why is my English so much better than your Russian?"

 _"Это не!"_ exclaimed Hank, punching Pyotr in the arm.

The colonel laughed again, passed the chocolate powder packet (freeze-dried ice cream, as it turned out) to Hank, and went off to check on Captain Nguyen.

* * *

> **Saturday, February 16th**   
>  **IPV-102 _Athena_ in Martian Orbit**   
>  **Day 71 of the mission**

Artificial gravity had been negligible to nonexistent for the last day and a half. Hank made the best of the situation and spent his every last waking hour pouring over the photographs stored in his computer; the translation algorithms that he had invented and coded himself; and the dictionary and grammar of the alien language that he had compiled. He was as certain as he could be that his translation was accurate—and there was a measure of pride to be found in the fact that nobody else had cracked the code.

The ruins had been discovered during the very first manned mission to Mars, back in 2031. Stone structures, undeniably artificial, had been detected in the Malea Planum region, near the edge of Mars's southern polar icecap. Moreover, infrared scans had shown that the largest of the structures was much, much warmer than its surroundings—which could have meant anything, but probably meant a power source of some kind, still active after who-could-only-guess how long.

But the first mission to Mars had only planned for a landing at Utopia Planitia, nowhere near Malea Planum, and so the ruins had to be noted from orbit and flagged for further study. It would be up to the crew of the second manned mission to Mars, in 2036, to set foot among extraterrestrial-built structures for the first time in recorded human history. Those astronauts had gone over the ruins with a fine-toothed comb; they had found evidence of writing on the exteriors of some of the structures, and they had recovered many strange objects that might perhaps be Martian artifacts; but they never found any means of accessing the ruins' central building, the one that had glowed in the infrared from orbit—a layered structure, like a ziggurat or a step-pyramid, but hexagonal in its overhead profile, and standing some 70 meters tall.

The key, nearly everyone agreed, had to be in the writing—strange symbols, they reminded one of an odd mix of Klingon, Gallifreyan, Tengwar, and Linear B—but there they were, etched onto the ruins, worn beyond all use or recognition in some places, plain as day in others. It was no hoax: Martian lapidary. And Dr. Henry Swanson—American linguist and computer-geek extraordinaire—believed that he and he alone had solved the puzzle that had the entire human race scratching its collective head.

At any rate, his pitch had been convincing enough that NASA wound up selecting him to join the mission, which had led to Hank spending the past two months aboard the _Athena_ , refining and checking both his translation and his code, which had in its turn led to the insane moment that was now: Dr. Swanson, buckled into the landing-craft behind Col. Lenkov and Capt. Nguyen.

The _Athena's_ orbit was as stable as it would ever be. Mission Control at Canaveral (after ten minutes' delay for the radio signals to cover the distance) had confirmed. Now they were just waiting for the proper launch-window—for their orbit to carry them back over the Martian equator.

Captain Nguyen watched the countdown-clock, eagerness showing openly on her face. In the relatively short time that he had known her, Hank had decided that she was an incurable adrenaline-junkie, although he couldn't begin to guess whether it was just her personality or a stereotypical pilot thing.

Then—finally—the timer reached zero, and Lenkov and Nguyen began the launch sequence. Emily spared a moment to look over her shoulder at Hank—not exactly easy to do in the bulky EV suits they were all wearing—and smiled a devilish smile. "Hold onto your nuts, Doc. This is gonna be the wildest ride you've ever been on!"

"Kind of hard to beat the launch from Canaveral," replied Hank dryly.

"Think so?" said Emily. "Just wait." With a wink and a toothy grin, she put her hand on the throttle and waited only for the colonel's nod—then pulled it, setting off the small charges that detached the lander from the main craft. After a short burst from the dorsal thrusters to, in effect, destabilize their own orbit and send them down towards the planet, inertia would carry them the rest of the way.

But for the moment, it didn't feel like anything at all. It wasn't a bumpy ride; in the micro-gravity, it just felt like free-fall.

"Atmosphere in T minus two," announced Captain Nguyen.

"The atmosphere of Mars is thin," said Pyotr over his shoulder to Hank, "but compared to vacuum? We are going to feel this!"

"Great," muttered Hank.

Less than two minutes later, the whole landing-craft was rocked by a distressingly solid-feeling **_BUMP_** … and then nothing.

"Atmospheric entry achieved," said Nguyen. "Beginning EDL procedures."

"That wasn't so bad," said Hank.

Emily and Pyotr didn't answer; the colonel only smirked.

Hank half expected to see something spectacular—flames licking the front of the craft due to the friction of re-entry, or something like that. The kind of things you'd expect from movies. But instead—

"Initialize descent thrusters," ordered Col. Lenkov. "Ten second burn, then readjust."

"Aye-aye," said Nguyen, immediately punching the thrusters. Again, the whole craft bucked—Hank felt like he'd just been kicked in the ass from right up through his seat—and as the rockets outside the craft did their part to slow their descent, Nguyen let out a breath that she hadn't even realized she'd been holding.

Several more times, the descent thrusters were aimed and fired, but it felt to Dr. Swanson that they were _gaining_ speed rather than losing it. And then, finally, those small stabilizing rockets were empty. (Of course, most of the lander's mass was still fuel at this point—it would be needed for when they lifted off again.) Through the forward portal, the three-man crew could see only the reddish-yellow surface of Mars, dusty and cratered, and they were still thousands of feet up—

Atmospheric friction had finally reached the point where the exterior of the lander was starting to glow, just a bit; and inside, the noise was ear-splitting. "Now comes the fun part!" shouted Col. Lenkov over the din. "Hang on"

Capt. Nguyen pulled another control, and— **FWUMPH!** —outside the lander, an enormous system of layered airbags inflated all around the craft, effectively encasing the whole thing in a giant beach-ball-shaped air-cushion tens of meters across.

Now it no longer mattered whether up was down or vice versa, not that the crew could do anything about it with the landing-rockets empty anyway, and everything started to _spin_ —as the passenger compartment whirled around them, violently changing directions at times, twisting this way and that, Hank screamed and tried to keep his lunch down, and the colonel held his breath and closed his eyes and counted off the seconds, and Emily laughed and laughed and laughed…


	2. Landfall to Ruin

"Come on, Doc, snap out of it." Emily slapped Hank across the face with a heavy EV-suit glove.

Hank responded by snapping awake and screaming, uncontrollably, again.

Emily looked down at Pyotr, who was still strapped in the commander's seat— _down_ , of course, because the nose of the lander was pointed at the ground, leaving both the colonel and Dr. Swanson suspended in their seats and held in place only by the safety straps—and said, "I think he's okay."

"Probably just fainted," said Pyotr. Bracing his feet against the lander's dashboard, he unbuckled his own straps and carefully stood up. Then he clambered up to stand on the back of his own seat, as Emily had already done, so that he could reach Hank.

By now, Hank's shouts had become empty hyperventilations. "We—we—we—we're—"

"Alive. In one piece." Emily shrugged and started working on Hank's restraints. "Only problem is, the lander is nose-to-tail where it should be when we want to blast off again."

"The lithobreaking system is designed to account for that," said Col. Lenkov, who held Hank in place while Emily undid the last of the seat-belts. Once the linguist was safely on his feet (albeit perched precariously on the back of the pilot's seat alongside Em), Pyotr finished explaining, "The onboard computer will deflate the aft airbags first and roll everything into position for blastoff automatically. We just have to wait for the system to do its job—and then finish suiting up."

It was another tense fifteen or twenty minutes before they heard the sound of some of the airbags slowly deflating and felt the landing-craft start to rock back into a more level position—and then another half an hour to level off completely. Soon the system would carry on past that, so that when the time came for liftoff, once they were strapped back into their seats, their backs would be to the ground. Lenkov spent the intervening time monitoring the oxygen levels in the cabin, while Nguyen and Swanson did another seal-check on their EV suits and oxygen tanks. Finally, they helped each other into their helmets and prepared to exit the craft.

* * *

Pyotr Lenkov was the first of the trio to set his boots onto the dusty Martian soil. Emily Nguyen jumped gracefully down from the hatch a moment later, and right behind her, Hank Swanson threw a leg over the lip and tumbled down into the dirt.

"Yeah, feel that!" shouted Emily into her mic, jumping up and down a few times. "A third of a G—this is awesome!"

"For a little while," answered Pyotr. "Stay too long, though, and your muscles atrophy, your heart weakens, your bones lose mass…"

"Yeah, whatever!" retorted Emily. "We're on friggin' _Mars_! **Woo-hoo!** " Taking a few bouncing steps, she tried a long jump and cleared three meters easily.

Hank managed to right himself by leaning on the lander's hull and said, "Look, we only have so many hours, and I'd really like to take a look at that—structure, whatever it is, so let's just figure out where we are and go, okay?"

"Nguyen is right about one thing," said Pyotr to Hank. "We are on 'frigging Mars'! The sixth, seventh, and eighth human beings to ever set foot on this planet! Take a moment—take it in!"

Hank looked askance at Pyotr, but decided to heed his advice. He looked around: they were in some kind of low-lying volcanic plain, jagged hills in one direction (based on maps that Hank had seen of their landing site, he guessed that was north), huge impact-craters everywhere else, and off to the south—that took his breath away. He could just barely make out the outline of the ruins, against a backdrop of white—the edge of the icecap. It was a ways off, though, and thank goodness they weren't going on foot.

Behind Hank, the landing craft was more or less positioned correctly now, with the rocket cones flat on the ground and the last of the airbags deflating at the nose. A detachable module had broken away cleanly, as it was supposed to, and this metallic crate, three meters to a side, required only one of the astronauts to open it up—Nguyen was already there, prying off one of the panels. "The buggy landed driver's side down," she announced. "Give me a hand!"

Between the three of them and Martian gravity, it was no trouble at all to roll the box upright and finish disassembling it. Lenkov checked over the tires and the battery to confirm that everything still seemed to be in working order and started up the vehicle.

Pretty soon, with a quiet electric _whirrr_ , the three astronauts were zipping across the reddish sands and making for the ruins—Nguyen at the wheel, Lenkov riding shotgun, and Swanson in the back seat with his precious computer and a bulky piece of equipment that had been pre-stowed in the buggy back on Earth at the doctor's request.

* * *

The electric dune-buggy wasn't terribly fast; it took them the better part of an hour to traverse the volcanic plain. Their passage was the only sign of motion in the lifeless desert that was the Malea Planum: in the thin Martian atmosphere, there wasn't even any detectable wind to disturb their surroundings. The stillness felt altogether unnatural, like traveling through some kind of artificial diorama of a landscape—totally eerie to the Earthlings.

Eerie, and at the same time awe-inspiring: this desert somehow felt more _pristine_ than any on Earth. Biologically, if not quite geologically, dead. Preserved in time.

But if the natural beauty of the desert was breathtaking, the ruins were positively ominous. The previous mission had brought back samples of the stone for potassium-argon dating, but the results had been inconclusive. For all these astronauts knew, the ruins could have been thousands of years old, or millions—although the presence of intact lapidary did put some kind of hard limit on the ruins' age, since there was still _some_ erosion taking place. Mars wasn't anywhere near as active as Earth, but it did still have weather, after all.

As the ruins grew nearer, Hank and Pyotr both found themselves staring, awestruck, at structures they had only seen before in photographs—structures that, for the time being, the rest of the human race would only be able to dream of visiting in person. Like the intact central ziggurat-type structure, the smaller buildings that surrounded it, most of them collapsed, were generally hexagonal in shape. Likewise, the toppled stone columns were made from smooth-hewn blocks that would have been hexagonal when viewed from above, back when the columns were still intact, one block stacked atop another.

Emily, for her part, was looking for a good place to park the buggy—somewhere flat, and well away from any craters, just in case. There seemed to be fewer signs of impacts from space the nearer they got to the ancient, alien site; and so she drove the vehicle practically right up to the ruins' front-doorstep and then brought the vehicle to a gentle halt.

Just then, a bit of wind kicked up, causing a cloud of red dust to drift between the buggy and the ruins. It obscured the astronauts' vision of the broken stone structures for a few seconds and then dissipated.

Hank felt a chill in his spine. This place was so _old_ ; it must have predated any known human stonework. It made him feel small, and young, and tremendously excited. "Keep your eyes peeled for any inscriptions," he said, leaping out of the buggy's back seat. "The last team might have missed something. You never know."

Emily paused just long enough to pop open a storage-compartment nestled between the driver and passenger seats: she retrieved a portable mass-spec analyzer and a small pick for pulverizing rock samples, clipping both tools to the belt of her EV suit. Then she followed after Hank, and stood beside him as he gazed at the remains of a small stone building. Only one wall was still standing. Set into the wall was a rectangular doorway, some two meters tall and barely half a meter wide. A human would practically have to walk sideways to squeeze through, and the EV suit and oxygen tank would make that a tight fit indeed. "Did the, uh, last team ever find out what a Martian looked like?" Emily asked.

" _Nyet_ ," said the colonel, coming up behind her. "No pictures, no bodies—not even bones. Whoever lived here is _long_ gone."

"It's weird," said Hank, staring at the doorway. "These buildings don't have airlocks; no signs of advanced technology. Mars must have been a very different place when this site was occupied."

"That doesn't make _any_ sense," said Emily. "If Mars ever had a breathable atmosphere, it would have been, what, two or three _billion_ years ago? These ruins can't be _that_ old."

Hank shrugged (not that that you could tell through the EV suit) and said, "There's a lot about this place that doesn't make sense. Hey, Pete?"

Pyotr was already back at the buggy, retrieving Hank's equipment. " _Da_ , I've got it." He hoisted the bulky, boxy gadget into his arms with relative ease. "In this Martian gravity, it isn't heavy at all." And indeed, the device was an armful, but no real trouble for the colonel to carry.

"I sure hope this theory of yours is right, Doc," said Emily.

"After two months and a hundred million miles?" said Hank. "It had better be."

* * *

They had to wait another twenty minutes for the _Athena's_ orbit to carry it back into radio range. After bouncing a transmission back to Canaveral to update mission control on their status, they proceeded into the ruins, with Hank leading the way, Pyotr carrying the sonic emitter, and Emily watching their six—ostensibly in case of unexpected Martians.

The feeling within the ruins was totally different from being out on the plains. The Malea Planum was void of life, but of course it was _supposed_ to be. This place felt rather like a tomb that ought not to be one—silent, empty, and totally incongruous on account of it.

At one point, Emily thought that she saw something moving—shadows, flitting about between the fallen stones—but she heard nothing, and when she looked at Pyotr and Hank and saw that they apparently hadn't noticed a thing, she decided not to mention it. Probably just her imagination getting the better of her.

These were freaking _ruins on Mars_ , after all. Em found the whole business to be, in a phrase, "hella creepy". This was how horror movies and some of the scarier _Doctor Who_ episodes got started. (Emily had always had little crush on the Seventeenth Doctor.)

 _Everybody_ jumped when another gust of wind blew down the main thoroughfare, the wide street that stretched all the way from the ziggurat at the center of the ruins to the edge of the site where the buggy was parked. The wind seemed to be coming from the direction of the ziggurat, and it caused a bit of rubble to come loose from one of the smaller buildings on their left. It wasn't much more than a handful of dust and pebbles rolling down a gentle incline, but the unexpected noise (barely audible, but enough to break the silence) caused everyone to freeze in place.

After a moment, Hank let out a breath. "Whew. You guys getting a 'Martian Chronicles' vibe from this place?"

"Totally channeling Bradbury over here," agreed Emily.

"I always liked Asimov better," commented Pyotr.

"Yeah, well… we do stand a better chance of running into a robot here than a Martian ghost, I'll give you that," said Hank.

"Don't talk about ghosts," said Emily, a hint of a quaver in her voice.

Surprised, Hank turned to her. "You believe in ghosts?"

She shrugged. "More things in heaven and earth, and all that."

"That… is not a very rigorous epistemology," said Pyotr.

"Look, whatever! I just don't want to talk about ghosts," snapped Emily. "Let's just do this thing and save the planet, okay!?"

* * *

They approached the central structure. There was an obvious door, four meters tall and just as wide, sealed with a stone slab. Mission control had ruled out attempting to blast through, for fear of collapsing the entire building. Its contents were apt to be priceless, both archaeologically and technologically. Frankly, the human race couldn't afford to take the risk. They needed civilization to be weened off of fossil fuels, like, twenty years' worth of yesterdays ago—and as of 2041, experimental fusion reactors were still a net negative on power generation.

But whatever it was that had been humming along inside this temple (or whatever the building was supposed to be) for millennia, possibly far longer? That could be humanity's salvation.

Hank came up to the side of the building and laid a gloved hand on some of the stones near the door, where the lapidary had been etched there in a previous age by alien hands. To feel it for himself, even through reinforced EV-suit gloves, was nothing short of a marvel. And _he_ had figured out what it all meant.

"Alien music," he said softly to himself.

"I've been waiting two months to hear what it sounds like," said Emily.

Pyotr chuckled and said, "Probably not as good as Beethoven."

Both Hank and Emily paused and turned to stare at Pyotr.

"What, you expect me to say 'Tchaikovsky' or 'Stravinsky'? My favorite composer is Beethoven!" As he spoke, he started setting up Hank's gadget—a high-powered sonic emitter, basically a very fancy audio speaker—and positioning it to face the door.

Hank pulled out his iPage and turned on the Bluetooth connection to get it talking wirelessly to the emitter. "Actually, Mozart would be a better comparison," he said. "I figured it all out when my algorithms kept finding more mathematical harmony in the symbols than any language I'd ever—"

"God, we don't need to hear the story _again_ , Doc!" cut in Emily. "Just switch the damn thing on!"

"All right, all right, keep your space-suit on," Hank grumbled. He manipulated the flexible touch-screen (all of the EV-suit gloves used by NASA and other space agencies were capacitive anymore, for just this very reason), loaded up the correct sequence, and hit the "play" button.

Nothing happened.

"Doc?" said Emily.

"I—I don't—" Hank looked down at his computer; the connection seemed to be working properly. He knelt down by the emitter; the speaker was vibrating. "I don't get it," said Hank.

"I don't hear anything," said Pyotr.

"Me neither," admitted Hank.

It was Emily who made the connection. "It's the atmosphere! It's too thin for the sound to carry!"

Hank shook his head. "Can't be. We accounted for that when we designed the emitter." He sat down on the dusty ground to think. "Maybe if I try some different frequencies—"

But Pyotr had a better idea. Without saying anything, he came up behind Hank, picked up the speaker-box, and carried it right up to the door. Placing the speaker directly against the stone, he held it there—and after about fifteen seconds, the massive slab began to grumble and groan.

Hank scrambled to his feet and Emily leaped back in surprise. The doorway rumbled open, rubble and dust falling away in small clouds. The whole slab, more than a meter thick, slid slowly down into the ground until the top of it was flush with the floor. Now the inside of the ancient ziggurat was open to them—pitch black and perfectly still.

Pyotr turned to the others and said, "That worked! Shall we go?"

Wordlessly, Hank and Emily followed him into the alien structure.


	3. The Stars Beneath Us

"I still didn't get to hear what the music sounded like," complained Emily. "I keep imagining the riff from _Close Encounters_ , and it's bugging the crap out of me."

She and Hank both reached up to their helmets and switched their headlamps on; Pyotr set the sonic emitter down at his feet and followed suit. Once they were able to look around, the astronauts found themselves in an empty antechamber, a perfect cube not quite five meters to the side. The floor, the walls, and the ceiling were all perfectly smooth, shiny (like polished obsidian), and bluish-black in color.

Hank crossed over to the far wall, opposite the doorway they had all just come through, and dimmed his lamp. When he peered closely at the strange, not-quite-metallic surface, he could almost make out his own reflection in it.

Pyotr came up beside Hank and rapped on the wall with a gloved knuckle. The wall felt solid enough, but he couldn't tell whether it was made of stone or metal or something else entirely.

"There must be some way to move deeper into the structure," said Pyotr. "Keep looking."

"Yeah," said Hank. "This has got to be some kind of, uh, entry-hall, or something." He peered closely at the back wall of the chamber, looking for a seam, a button, a tiny imperfection, anything at all—but came up empty-handed.

Emily, meanwhile, had started knocking on the side walls, looking for hollow spots, when suddenly the whole room began to vibrate. She whirled about and shouted, "Guys—the door!" In that same instant, with a vigorous rumble that almost knocked all three astronauts off their feet, the stone slab shot back out of the ground like a bolt-gun and slammed into the ceiling, trapping them within the chamber.

"Oh, shit!" – "Motherfu—" – "Блядь!" The trio scrambled for the door, and Hank and Emily beat their fists on it, to no avail. The inside of the stone door had the same blue-black glassy surface as the chamber's other walls—and so now they really were inside a perfectly-formed cube.

Pyotr knelt down and picked up Hank's sonic emitter. "Doctor?"

"Yeah, got it," said Hank. He retrieved his flexible touch-screen and once again loaded up the sequence that had opened the door in the first place. Pyotr held the emitter up to the wall, Hank started the sequence, and now the chamber was filled with a barely-audible, low-pitched reverberation.

A minute passed, and still the door didn't budge. Hank growled in frustration and said, "Damn it, it's not working!"

"No shit, genius!" snapped Emily. She shoved Hank hard enough to force him back a few steps and said, "Now we're stuck in here, and it's all your stupid fault—!"

"Hey—Captain, take it easy," said Pyotr. He switched the emitter off again, set it back down on the floor, and put himself between Emily and Hank. "We just have to calm down and—think this through, _da_?"

"The colonel's right," said Hank. "We made it this far, we can figure this out!"

An awkward silence fell over the trio. They spread out and searched the room again, intending this time to go over every last square centimeter, but it wasn't any easier on them now that the only light came from their own small headlamps.

Hank was starting to feel a bit claustrophobic—trapped in a dark room, the only sounds he could hear coming from his own breathing and fidgeting, his breath fogging up his face-plate—when the chamber was abruptly lit up again, this time by an array of blue-white beams. A fluorescent grid of laser-light seemed to come from somewhere in the ceiling (with no sign of emitters or other devices to act as a source), sweeping back and forth across the room. Whenever a beam struck one of the astronauts, several more would change direction and all zero in on that individual, scanning them up and down.

"What's it doing?" asked Emily. She moved into the middle of the chamber, her arms held up to either side, and watched nervously as the beams followed her.

"Scanning us," said Pyotr. "I think."

"They could be some kind of security or decon measure," suggested Hank. "Or maybe something is just trying to figure out what we are."

Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the beams went away and the room fell dark again.

A quiet minute ticked by; then two, and three, and still nothing had changed. "I don't like this," said Emily.

Hank went back over to the wall and pushed on it; he knocked again; and then he took a deep breath and bellowed at the top of his lungs, **" _HELLOOO! Anybody home!?_ "**

Both Pyotr and Emily winced, and Emily shouted back, "We're using transmitters, you idiot! Nobody else can hear you!"

Hank looked at her sheepishly. "Oh—yeah. Forgot; sorry."

But then—as if responding to Hank's call—something small did change: a single blinking light, a tiny purple dot less than half a centimeter across, appeared in the center of one of the walls (the one that would have been left of the door as they were coming in). It was Pyotr who spotted it out of the corner of his eye. "Hey—look at this!"

The three humans crowded around the little speck of light, and as they did so, it morphed into an image on the wall, roughly a square foot in size, consisting of more alien symbols not unlike those etched onto the stone outside the building. It was a glowing patch of purple alien text, some of the lines animated and scrolling, very much resembling a computer display.

"What does it say?" asked Emily.

Hank held up his own computer, aimed the camera at the text, and allowed his algorithms to go to work. After another minute or so, he looked down in puzzlement at the partial translation on his flexible screen. "Uh, my program recognizes the numbers seven and eight, on these lines, here, and here," he pointed, "next to a word that means 'part' or 'element'. And these are also numbers—they're changing, counting up in sequence—no, wait, they've stopped. At twenty-nine and seven."

In that moment, the glowing display on the wall also changed from purple to orange, and another word appeared at the bottom of the "screen", blinking alongside a hexagon-shaped cursor.

Hank stared at the readout—he would have scratched his head if he could have only reached it through his helmet. "I guess that word there means that whatever it was doing is finished" he said at last. "But I couldn't tell you what it was."

"Well don't look at me," said Emily. "And I'm still blaming you, by the way."

A moment later, Pyotr burst out laughing. "Does the alien language use base six math?" he asked.

"Yeah, it does," said Hank. "But how did you—?"

"Think about it," said Pyotr. "Seven and eight are the atomic numbers for nitrogen and oxygen—"

Hank caught on. "—And if the aliens used base six math, they might use the number thirty-six the way we'd use a hundred—like a percentage!"

Pyotr grinned. "Exactly."

"So, what?" said Emily.

"So," said Hank, "Seven parts in thirty-six oxygen, twenty-nine parts nitrogen—"

That, Emily understood. "A breathable atmosphere." She looked from Hank to Pyotr (who still sported a shit-eating grin) and asked, "You think this room just pressurized? Like an airlock?"

"You tell us," said Hank. "What does the mass-spec say?"

Emily took the scanner off of her belt and let the gadget go to work. After a few tense minutes, the analyzer gave some promising results. "Nitrogen and oxygen," she proclaimed, "and no traces of anything toxic. Still no way to check the pressure, though."

"There is _one_ way," said Pyotr ominously. He reached for the seals on his helmet.

Immediately, both Emily and Hank lunged forward to stop him. Emily shouted, "Are you _nuts_!?" and at the same time, Hank said, "Whoa, whoa—don't be stupid, Colonel!"

Pyotr paused. "Well—do either of you have a better idea?"

A sober silence fell over the trio. Then Hank glanced down at the sonic emitter still sitting on the floor nearby. "Yes, actually." He switched the emitter back on, queued up the alien music again, and now all present could hear a distinct but whispery ghost of a tune, reminiscent of wind blowing across hollow reeds, punctuated by an occasional sharp, lingering note, like a string plucked on a sitar.

"I can actually hear it now," commented Emily. "But you were right, Pete, it's no Beethoven."

"It's not exactly a barometer, either," said Pyotr, "but I think it's as good as we're going to get, _da_?"

"Yeah," said Hank. Then he sighed and said, "Look, if one of us is going to test the air in here, it should be me. My job's already done, you can use my computer for more translations if you need to, but both of you are needed to fly the lander—"

Emily cut him off. "That has got to be the dumbest—"

"He's right," said Pyotr quietly. Emily stopped and glared at the colonel, who could only close his eyes, frown, and repeat, "He's right. The mission—"

"—The mission comes first," finished Emily. "Okay." She held her hand out to Hank, who took it and shook it, and then said, "Good luck, Doc. Don't die."

Hank sucked in a deep breath. Then, without stopping to think about it anymore (because if he did, that would make him reconsider), he undid his helmet clasps. The seals hissed as they came loose. He lifted up the helm, eyes shut tightly, lungs just starting to ache from holding his breath… and then he exhaled, and inhaled.

Out, in; out, in. The air in the chamber was very dry and a bit on the thin side, but he was breathing. He was okay. "Whew—it's okay, guys. It's breathable."

A moment later, Emily and Pyotr had both doffed their own helmets, and Hank went about removing his gloves. He wanted to touch this strange metal-like surface, feel what it was like. He reached out a hand and brushed it against the glassy wall. It was perfectly smooth, that he was expecting, but it was also warm to the touch. Kind of like touching human skin.

Also, the moment his bare hand made contact, a vertical line of orange light running from the floor to the ceiling appeared on the wall opposite the outer door. "Oh—here we go," said Hank.

"It's almost as if it was… waiting for us to touch it," said Pyotr.

"Creepy," said Emily.

The seam parted; the back wall of the chamber split perfectly in two, and both halves spread apart to reveal a doorway. The opening was only about a meter wide, but it was as high as the entire antechamber—and beyond it, well, _that_ was a sight to behold.

The chamber on the other side of the door was domed and immense, every surface still made from the same perfectly smooth blue-black compound, or alloy, or whatever it was. As the walls curved up into the ceiling, they formed a semi-sphere that could have been fifty or even sixty meters high in the middle, easily. The floor was not perfectly level; rather, it sloped downward, at a much gentler curve than the ceiling, with the nadir sitting some ten meters below ground-level. And it was from this point that the only light in the room came: a narrow column of unwavering bluish-white, perhaps five meters tall, rose from the floor here. It was bright at the bottom and slowly tapered off into darkness at its peak, like a still image of a flame—never blinking or flickering, just steadily glowing. The dry air had a sterile smell; and still the only sounds came from the astronauts.

"Now this is more like it," said Hank, crossing into the dome-chamber. "What do you think, Pete, does this account for most of the structure's volume?"

"I would say so," said Pyotr, looking around in awe. Once again, there were no features or imperfections to be found on any of the walls—no panels or devices or other doorways. Just the mysterious light-source in the center.

"What do you think we'll find in this place?" said Emily, coming up behind them. "My money is on some kind of working cold fusion."

"Too impractical," said Pyotr. "It could be mater-antimatter annihilation."

"Even that would run out of fuel after a while," said Hank. "I'll give you guys both two-to-one on vacuum energy."

"What, like zero-point energy?" asked Emily. Her face screwed up in distaste. "Doesn't that require, like, a black hole? I don't think we could carry that home."

"Hawking radiation is only one way to get vacuum energy," said Hank. "Maybe these guys found a way to harness the Casimir effect, or—"

"Physically impossible!" said Pyotr. "I'll take your odds: I think it's going to be antimatter. Like _Star Trek_."

Hank put on his best bad Scottish accent and said, "Och, aye, but wha' aboot th' dilithium crystals, Captain? She cannae take the—"

"Shut up," said both Emily and Pyotr at the same time.

"You know, 'physically impossible' was what they said about the EM drive," muttered Hank, "but it still got us to Mars."

"Well—let's go find out!" said Emily. She took point and practically skipped her way down the gentle slope towards the glowing spot in the middle of the chamber.

* * *

Once the three astronauts were close enough to get a good look at the base of the light-column, they beheld it with a mix of wonderment and disappointment. The glow was coming from a circle in the floor, about two meters in diameter, with no buttons or panels or any indications at all as to its purpose or function.

With a bit of trepidation, Emily waved her still-gloved hand through the light. She momentarily cast a hand-shaped shadow upwards, but otherwise nothing happened.

Hank approached the edge of the circle and said, "The airlock didn't open until I touched it, so maybe…?"

"Be careful, Doctor," said Pyotr. "And don't forget mission priority: we need to find out what powers this place."

Hank nodded. "Well, that info screen just sort of 'popped up' on a random wall, so if there's an interface here, it could be just about anywhere." He got down on his hands and knees and started feeling around on the floor outside the glowing circle.

Emily knelt down and peered closely at the edge of the light-column. "I can't exactly tell where the light is coming from," she said. "It's just… rising up out of the floor."

Pyotr circled around the whole area, getting a view of it from all sides. "This place is… incredible. And very advanced, I think. But not very user-friendly."

"We're missing the cultural context here," said Hank. "Whoever built this place obviously knew how things worked, but… hell, we were barely able to make the airlock open."

"But it did give us an atmosphere we can breathe," said Emily. "That's something, right? I mean, maybe the Ancient Martians breathed air like ours, but it could've been different too."

"Maybe," said Hank. "You think the airlock scanned us and matched the atmosphere to our physiology?"

Emily shrugged. "Or it read the environment in our suits. Either one is possible—and spooky."

"Then… perhaps this place is trying to _help_ us figure it out," said Pyotr. "That implies a very powerful computer at work." His eyes began to gleam with curiosity and desire. "A quantum computer? An artificial intelligence?"

Hank stood up. "Well I can't find a control panel or anything, so… I'm going to try stepping into the light. Maybe that'll make something happen."

Pyotr nodded. "Whenever you are ready, Doctor."

"Colonel; Captain," said Hank, nodding to each of his companions in turn. "Just in case something funky happens, I want you both to know… it's been an honor."

"Likewise, ya stupid friggin' genius," said Emily. She gave Hank a wry half-smile, and he returned it. Then he faced the column and walked into the light.

Once he crossed the threshold, the light became bright enough to blind him—he squinted, but he couldn't really see anything. Then his eyes very quickly adjusted to their surroundings, and Hank found himself standing in a vast, empty space. He couldn't see the domed chamber or Pyotr or Emily anymore; he couldn't even see the floor that he was standing on. Instead, he found himself perched atop the bright core of a spiral galaxy, with the arms radiating away from him and stretching out to a distance that would have filled the entire chamber (if he had still been able to see it). Overhead, countless distant galaxies shimmered like individual stars—it was like looking at a photograph from the Hubble Deep Field, but far more spectacular in its grandeur and immediacy.

Pyotr's voice came from… somewhere. "Doc? What are you looking at?"

"I can't see you," called Hank. "I'm in some kind of… hologram or something."

"We can see still _you_ ," said Emily. "What does it look like?"

"It's… a galaxy," said Hank. "I think it might be the Milky Way." He glanced down and noticed a blinking orange dot, about halfway out on one of the spiral arms. He dropped to one knee and reached an arm out, and the image reacted instantly—it zoomed in on that region, and Hank now found himself staring at an image of about a hundred stars, with a yellow dwarf star hovering right in front of his face, a little orange arrow pointing at it and blinking. "Now I think it's showing me our location—our Sun, in the Orion Arm. You guys have got to see this!"

A second later, Emily and Pyotr appeared next to Hank within the hologram. As they did so, the image zoomed back out, to show the entire galaxy beneath their feet once again.

Emily looked up at the glittering galaxies overhead and whistled. "Now _this_ is some cool shit!"

"Watch this," said Hank. He pointed his arm at another region of the galaxy, somewhere random and far away, and that part of the image likewise zoomed in, surrounding the trio with a volume of stars only a few dozen parsecs across.

"Incredible!" said Pyotr. "If this is a map of our galaxy… the scale and detail are nothing short of astounding!"

"Yeah," said Emily. "This is really—" Then she noticed something. "Hey—what's this?" One of the stars in this region of the map, a red dwarf—the commonest sort of star in the galaxy—had a little blinking purple arrow pointing at it. She reached a finger out to touch the tiny holographic star—

**_WOOOOSH!_ **

—everything went all white for a moment, blinding all three astronauts. And then the hologram vanished—no more stars, no more Milky Way, no more distant galaxies.

And no more Hank Swanson, Emily Nguyen, or Pyotr Lenkov. The domed chamber on Mars was empty.


	4. Motes on Solar Wind

The first thing that Hank noticed upon waking was the heat. It was a dry, sweltering heat, the kind you might encounter while spending the "dog days" of August in Phoenix, Arizona. He could feel the sweat pooling in uncomfortable places inside his EV suit—irritating, and gross, but at least it meant that he didn't have heat stroke.

It was dark. Not quite pitch-black, but dark enough that Hank couldn't make out any details of his surroundings. His bare hands brushed against the floor—rough stone, and dirty. He tried to sit up; but his limbs didn't want to move. Everything ached. Especially his head: that was throbbing with a sharp pain that stabbed him repeatedly right behind the eyes—the mother of all migraines. In fact, it felt as if he had a tiny Norman Bates rattling around inside his skull and going full _Psycho_ on his optic nerves.

He tried to breathe; but the air in this place was even thinner than it had been before. To Hank, who had grown up in Colorado, it felt like being high up in the Rockies.

Well, that explained the headache.

Over the protestations of his angry muscles, he drew back his arms and pushed up with his elbows. The EV suit was bulky, but not at all heavy. As Hank struggled to rise, he noticed that he wasn't really feeling his own weight either. He was exhausted, and he hurt all over—but the gravity was still light. Roughly Martian gravity: zero-point-three Gs.

Finally, with an awkward low-gravity bounce, Hank managed to flip himself over and get up on his hands and knees. He groped around for whatever he could find—perhaps it was too much to hope that he might stumble across one of their helmets, but of course those had been left near the airlock—until he felt the distinctive reinforced outer-ribbing of another NASA-issue EV suit. He shook the still form in front of him—was it Pyotr or Emily?—and tried to call out, but his hoarse voice vanished into the thin air.

Still the other astronaut didn't move. Light—Hank needed light. He crawled back over to where he had woken up. Surely it was still here: he'd been holding it in his hands the entire time! At last, he felt the smooth plastic surface of his iPage, and it sprang to life at his touch. The light-emitting cells were bright enough to act as a poor man's flashlight, and that was exactly what Hank required at the moment.

He turned the light onto his unmoving companion—and suppressed the sudden urge to vomit.

It was Pyotr—or, approximately fifty percent of Pyotr. His head, his left shoulder, at least half of his torso, and most of his right side were there; but the rest simply wasn't. He had been neatly bisected by a perfectly straight cut running from his left shoulder down to his right thigh, with the gaping wound—if it was appropriate to call an entire half of a person being missing a "wound"—totally cauterized. Charred black, as if he'd been cut in two by the giant laser-beam from _Goldfinger_.

"Oh God," choked Hank, the bile rising in his throat. He lowered his light-source and stumbled back from the corpse, nearly losing his balance in the weak gravity.

Then it hit him: Emily. Where was she? Hank found his voice and called out, "Emily!?" He shined his meager light around—he was in some kind of vaulted chamber with sandstone walls and hexagonal columns, the floor around him strewn with rubble and debris—but there was no sign of her. "Hey, EM! …CAPTAIN NGUYEN!?"

No answer. His own voice didn't even echo back.

Hank risked another glance at the body on the floor—yep, it was definitely the upper-right-hand half of Pyotr Lenkov; and, yep, it was still entirely too unsettling to look at—and then he tried to force himself to focus. Where was he? What had happened? And where was Emily? Had the rest of Pyotr wound up with her, wherever she was?

Following that morbid thought, he decided that the best course of action would be to explore his surroundings, to try and get his bearings.

It was difficult to concentrate. The thin air, the splitting headache, the hundred-degree heat, the trauma of seeing the colonel like _that…_ the only thing Hank seemed to have going for him was the fact that there _was_ still breathable air at all.

He needed water. And food eventually, but with the way he was sweating, water was going to become a big problem very soon.

And he had to pee.

* * *

After quickly removing his EV suit and relieving himself in a dark corner of the vault, Hank set himself to the task of figuring out just where in the living hell he was now. Apart from his computer, there were a few other light-sources on the far side of the chamber, very faint and out beyond where the rows of stone columns ended. The first order of business would be to investigate those.

The flexible screen didn't make a very convenient flashlight, but after a moment's thought, he tried rolling it into a cylinder with the screen facing outward—now he had a makeshift torch. One with an effective range of barely more than a meter, but it was something.

Now it came to it—Hank had a light, he had his wits about him (mostly), and there was no good reason to stay here. Also, not long ago, he had just shouted for Emily at the top of his lungs. In retrospect, that had been a panicky move, and not very bright. Between the noise and the light, anything that might be lurking in those shadows definitely knew he was here…

Hank clamped down on that thought and tried to steel himself for what was next. Nevertheless, abject fear kept him rooted in place for a good long while. He wasn't sure how long, exactly, but a great many agonizing minutes went by before he finally worked up the courage to move out.

Finally, he spared a last glance at the discarded pieces of his EV suit (basically everything except the boots) and Pyotr's body. There was no sense in dragging either along. The colonel was a corpse—or rather, half of one—and the EV suit was useless without a helmet anyway. Then Hank took the first few tentative steps across the vault. He heard his footfalls scuff across the dust-caked stone floor, smelled the ancient and musty air, but still everything else about this place was still. Like a tomb.

Slowly, cautiously, Hank crept across the vault. Everything around him was rough-hewn stone: crude and primitive, no sign of lapidary or other writing anywhere, and there was certainly no advanced technology.

At least, that was the case until he arrived at the far side of the room. The softly glowing lights were coming from two metallic panels set into the stone wall. One was a small control panel set at about eye-level to Hank and positioned next to a set of heavy blast doors, two meters tall and one wide. The other light-source was quite obviously a computer terminal of some kind, with a curvy and ergonomic-looking seat sized for a being rather taller than Hank (if he were to sit in it, his legs would dangle over the edge and his feet would still be inches above the floor), a control interface of some kind set into the wall, and a crystalline emitter where a screen would normally be, projecting a flickering hologram of orange static and the occasional bit of alien text.

Hank looked from the door to the computer-terminal, and his curiosity got the better of him. He moved to stand in front of the terminal interface—it wasn't a keyboard, just a huge touchpad covered in symbols, about as high off the ground as his chest. He examined the symbols for a moment; by now, he recognized the alien numbers on sight, but those only made up a fraction of all the symbols, mostly on the left side of the panel. Then, with a shrug, he tried touching the panel—it sprang to life, lit up, and the holographic display instantly sharpened into an image.

Hank jumped back in surprise—the display above the terminal was still flickering in and out and punctuated with bursts of static, but now it had a shape. A face. And a voice.

The image depicted was that of an alien—which is not to say that it was some bizarre creature Hank had never seen before. Quite the opposite: it was the typical, indeed the _stereotypical_ kind of an "alien" which had been current in popular culture on Earth since the mid twentieth century. A cultural shorthand for the very idea of an extraterrestrial: a bald, round head; two big, black eyes; a tiny mouth; and a slender, wiry frame, so gaunt as to appear emaciated. A Roswell "gray".

"Holy shit," whispered Hank.

The hologram of the "gray" continued to speak in a high, warbling language that Hank, even with the ear of a linguist, could barely follow: _"Wwrrvu'xxit mlbble grrt. Saaah'tuww drrll, wvblr vuuhlgg. Dblemmlr !oorkch'ktt. Saah. Vvrrebbt !lwra'xx'uul."_ The image droned on like this for a few moments more; and then something inside the terminal popped, a few sparks shot out of the emitter, and the whole thing died. The control panel started to smolder and smoke, and Hank was grateful that he had been startled enough to jump away earlier—or else he might have received a nasty shock or some burned fingers for his trouble.

"Power's on the fritz in here," he muttered to nobody in particular. Wherever the heck the power was coming from, anyway. He glanced over at the door. If this equipment was as old as it looked—which was to say, unbelievably fucking ancient—anything else might break down at any time, just like this terminal had. And that vault-door appeared to be the only way out of this place.

"Well, here goes." Hank walked over to the panel and tried waving his hand in front of it. Nothing happened, and so he touched it—bingo. The light turned from purple to orange, and the blast-door _hissed_ open, but only about two-thirds of the way. Then it got stuck. Hank could see it twitching, fighting to either open all the way or slam shut again; and so he turned his body sideways and darted through.

The ground on the other side wasn't level, so when Hank's foot struck solid stone, he tripped and pitched forward—with only a split second to catch himself on the heels of his palms, he landed hard enough that it hurt like a son of a bitch, but it saved him from an adventure-ending head-injury. He was on a stone staircase that went straight, well, _up_ to _somewhere_.

Hank rolled over, sat up on one of the steps, and examined his hands. They were bruised, and his right palm-heel had a scrape that bled freely. There was nothing around to use as a bandage, unless he wanted to tear a strip of cloth from his t-shirt, and he wasn't about to go the trouble yet if he didn't have to. As he considered his options, the vault-door finally made up its mind and _squeeeaked_ itself closed. There was a panel set into the wall on this side of the door too, but as the doors shut, its light flickered and then went out.

"So long, Colonel," said Hank quietly. "If I ever get back home, I'll be sure to play Beethoven's Ninth for ya."

There was no going back now. And so, after taking a minute to catch his breath in the thin air, he rose, faced the stairs, and began to ascend.

* * *

Each step of the staircase was as tall as Hank's own shin-bone. Climbing them in terrestrial gravity would have been a chore indeed, but here, Hank found that he was easily able to bound from one stair to the next with full strides. Occasionally, he would spring off so hard that he skipped a step like it was nothing. _This is going to be kind of fun,_ Hank found himself thinking, _at least until the atrophy sets in._

Soon enough, he reached the top—there were no blast-doors here, just a short stretch of open corridor leading into a much smaller room, with the same reddish sandstone floors and walls. Hank skidded to a halt and nearly tripped again when he came into this chamber: it had an occupant.

At least, Hank thought so. The creature—or device—standing in the middle of the room (and blocking Hank's path to another set of blast-doors on the far side) was obviously mechanical, about four feet tall and standing on six blade-like legs. Its body had a round, smooth outer shell or skin that looked like chrome or polished silver, albeit badly scuffed with age; and in the light of Hank's rolled-up iPage, he could make out several dings, dents, and burn-marks. There was no obvious face or head; just that weird and featureless egg-shaped body with the legs sprouting from it, like the thorax of a headless insect-robot.

Hank froze and put his hands up in what he hoped was a peaceful gesture.

The robot, or android, or whatever it was, took a few skittering steps in Hank's direction, then halted. It didn't have eyes, but to Hank, it seemed to be _looking_ at him. Then it let out a series of chirps and whistles—not electronic beeps like R2-D2, but literal chirping, like a birdsong. If this was a language, Hank couldn't even begin to tell the sounds apart—and it was very different from the tongue that the hologram downstairs had been speaking.

And so Hank said nothing, and the robot switched languages and now said something in a series of snaky hisses and low, rumbling growls.

"Um… okay," said Hank. "You're trying to communicate. Sorry, I don't know that one either."

The robot paused, as if processing. Then it tried a new language, and this time Hank recognized it as the one from the hologram. _"Vvwwlba !txxaah sshvvn?"_

"Right," said Hank, nodding. "Right. Vur-blah (*tongue click*)-ticks-ah shven!" he said, in a tremendously poor imitation of the alien speech. "I don't suppose you speak any English?"

Now the robot did something else: it lifted up one of its legs, and the tip started to glow, red-hot. Hank's eyes widened, and he found himself rooted in place with terror. What was it going to do? Zap him with a death-ray? Ask for Reese's Pieces and tell him to phone home?

The robot stood stock-still, as if waiting. Hank didn't know what to do. So he tried to inch his away around the thing, to make for the door; but it strafed to the side and blocked his path again. It wasn't attacking him, but it held that glowing blade-leg up in front of him, waiting on him to do _something_.

Hank sure as hell wasn't going to touch it, considering all the trouble that sort of thing had gotten him into recently. If this was some kind of… guardian, or security-drone, it was bound to be dangerous, possibly deadly.

"I don't know what you want me to do," said Hank slowly and evenly.

The robot didn't react.

Then an idea came to him: it was obviously programmed to speak multiple languages. Maybe it had software that could translate them too, if only Hank could provide it with enough examples of English to learn from. The robot was clearly an advanced alien creation—so maybe it was worth a shot?

"Hi," he said. "'Hi', that's a greeting in English. My language is English, a human language spoken on the planet Earth. It's part of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family… but you probably don't need to know that. Uh—okay, words. If you can even translate languages at all, you need words." He started to point. "Floor. Walls. Ceiling. It's all made of stone. Except that door, it's metal, and I'd like to _through_ it if I can. You get that? Go through?" He mimed walking two fingers across the surface of his rolled-up computer screen. "Can I go?"

 _"Go,"_ said the robot in a monotonous, mechanical voice.

"Yes!" said Hank. "Go! I'd like to go through the door! Can I go?" He pointed at the blast-doors excitedly and waited to see how the robot would react.

The robot's leg-tip stopped glowing red. It put its leg back down. But still it didn't move out of Hank's way. _"You—!txxaah—made."_ As it spoke, it twitched several times, and its voice was broken up by static whenever it switched between English and alien words.

"That's it!" said Hank. "Come on! What is it you need to tell me, or ask me? Is this some kind of—I don't know, security checkpoint? Restricted access? You need a password? Open sesame? What!?"

The robot shuddered and said, _"You—checkpoint—sshvvn—sesame."_ And then, with a hideous metallic squeal, it collapsed down onto the floor and powered off.

Hank stared at the fallen metal insect-thing for several seconds, blinking in surprise. He inched toward it, reached out a leg—maybe this was a dumb idea, but he had to be sure—and prodded it with the toe of his boot. It didn't react. It was just dead.

Hank heaved a sigh of relief. "I must be using up the last of the batteries in this place." Good for him; not so great for Earth, if he still wanted to complete the mission and find an advanced power-source he could bring back home.

Assuming he could ever find out where he was and how to _get_ back home.

Well, on with it then, he thought. Another set of doors awaited. He walked over to these, touched the glowing panel—and they slid open easily. The wind that hit him in the face wasn't musty or ancient; it was fresh. Alien-smelling, and as thin as a two-mile-high mountain-climb, but fresh nonetheless.

Dr. Henry Swanson from Colorado, Earth, found himself staring out at an alien landscape. It was a rugged steppe covered in jagged rocks and red-orange… moss? Grass? It was hard to tell. A flock of huge creatures—at this great distance, they looked like four-winged pterosaurs—sailed the skies on immense leathery wings. The sky itself had a rosy tinge, almost coral-colored, and a blood-red sun shone over the horizon. Dawn or dusk, Hank couldn't tell. But there were three moons visible in the sky, one of them lower than the others and _huge_ , pocked and cratered. The other two moons were higher up, much smaller, one of them shining lime green (with patches of dark forest-green), the other a solid baby blue.

"Well," said Hank to himself, "there's something you don't see every day."


	5. A Twilight of Difference

Hank watched, mesmerized, as the red sun rose over the horizon, and the sky slowly shifted color from coral-pink to lavender. The start of his first day on an alien world—or at least, that's what he supposed had to be the case. What were the alternatives, after all? Induced delusion; coma-dream; somehow still in the hologram? All were technically possibilities, but Hank was inclined to dismiss them out of hand, at least for the time being.

It all felt too real to disbelieve.

If Hank were hallucinating, why would his subconscious mind have dreamt up Pyotr's corpse like that? And if some weird alien consciousness or advanced AI were just trying to screw with him, why would _it_ show him that? No, he concluded; it made more sense to accept what he had seen as the truth. Colonel Lenkov was dead. Captain Nguyen was gone, possibly just as dead as the colonel.

Hank was alone—stranded—on an alien world. He was on another planet somewhere far, far away from Earth. With no idea how or even _if_ he could ever find his way back home.

He didn't want to believe that. He wanted desperately to wake up and find himself somewhere familiar again; or to shout to the heavens at the top of his lungs and demand to be released by whatever entity was responsible for his plight. But—here he was. The awful reality of his situation was staring him in the face.

And so—pending the discovery of evidence to the contrary—Hank resolved to act as though he could trust his eyes and other senses. And right now, at least for the moment, those senses were telling Hank that he really was on another planet. One with gravity similar to Mars, or maybe a little less; but with a breathable, albeit thin, atmosphere. Moreover, he was in a region where even the early morning temperatures were uncomfortably warm, which meant that as the day wore on, they would probably get even worse.

Hank was sweating profusely. Water had to be his first priority, or dehydration and perhaps even heat stroke would be a real danger soon enough. And it wasn't as if he could locate Emily or find a way home if he were dead, so…

He looked around: the vault-exit was set into a rocky hillside, brown and barren. A steep rock-wall loomed above, sheer enough that it would be impossible to scale, no matter how light the gravity. Compared to that, the vista of flat and deserted steppe that stretched off into the distance looked positively inviting. Plus, there seemed to be vegetation (of a sort) out on those lowlands, and where there was plantlife, there had to be water.

That assumed, of course, that said plantlife was carbon-based, and that the ecology of this planet was anything even vaguely earthlike.

Unable to think of any better course of action, Hank started down the hillside with awkward, low-gravity steps and the occasional (and very unintentional) floaty bounce.

* * *

Hank wove his way between jagged-edged boulders and did his level-best to avoid stepping on any loose piles of scree that might cause him to lose his footing and go plummeting down the hillside. The very last thing he needed right now was to get swept down to the bottom of the slope in a sudden avalanche, or buried under a rockslide.

Except for the sound of his own careful footfalls, it was quiet here: not altogether as eerie as the ruins on Mars, but nearly as still. The only sign of life in the immediate vicinity was the occasional odd-looking shrub growing in the loose soil, a plant of some sort that stood about waist-height relative to Hank, with woody-looking stalks and pentagonal leaves that were the color of dusty charcoal.

In fact, between the ceaseless quiet and the sheer uncanniness of his alien surroundings, Hank found himself very much on edge as he finally left the rock-slope behind and trudged out onto the open plains.

* * *

Hank had guessed right about the daytime temperatures on this planet. As the red sun rose ever-higher, the cloudless sky turned to a slightly off-putting shade of blue-violet, and the dry heat out on the steppe climbed easily above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

The vegetation carpeting the landscape turned out to be some kind of spongy orange _stuff_ that Hank wasn't sure whether to call moss, fungus, or lichen. It was soft and springy to the touch, and so far at least, it didn't seem to be in any way dangerous. But it _was_ mildly annoying: treading on the alien plantlife put even more spring into each of Hank's steps, and that, combined with the planet's weak gravity, made hiking across the plains feel rather like trying to moonwalk across miles of inflatable bouncy-castle. Thus, even though he wasn't burdened by as much of his own weight as he would have been on Earth, Hank nevertheless found himself working some decidedly unfamiliar muscles as he plodded onward.

Well, he thought to himself at one point, at least he was finally getting out and stretching his legs. That, at least, was more enjoyable than the tiny treadmill in the exercise module aboard the _Athena_.

But as the morning wore on, the oppressive heat and the difficult hike really started to get to him. Hank's mouth was so dry that his tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth, and his empty stomach simply would not quit growling at him. He found himself constantly thinking back to the moment that Emily had touched that holographic star and transported him here. Over and over in his head, Hank cursed her stupidity for getting him lost and Pyotr dead and Emily herself disappeared—even though he knew quite well enough that any one of them could have made the same mistake.

Even though he knew deep down that he too had been mere seconds away from fiddling with that part of the hologram, and foolishly activating a piece of alien tech that he couldn't possibly have hoped to understand.

* * *

Hank had figured that if there were any creeks or streams to be found out on the steppe, they would have to flow down from the highlands, the same as on Earth; and so he tried to keep the rocky foothills and bluffs on his left as he traveled. Now that he was down on the lowlands, he could see a majestic, white-capped mountain range rising up in the distance beyond the foothills that contained the alien vault Hank had emerged from. If those mountains really were topped with snow, that meant runoff, which in turn meant rivers. Hank thought that he had his best chance of encountering such a river if he walked more or less parallel to that mountain-range, which seemed to run approximately north–south; and with Hank arbitrarily deciding that the direction of the sunrise on this planet was east, that meant that he was now cutting a north-by-northeasterly course away from the vault.

(Besides following the mountains, the only other course of action that occurred to Hank was to strike straight out onto the plains and go chasing after the giant pterodactyl-things he saw flying off in the distance, to see whatever they did for water. But he wasn't prepared to take that step yet. He preferred to avoid the local megafauna for the time being, if at all possible.)

The hours dragged by, and still Hank walked on. At regular intervals, he would pause to study the sun's position in the sky, and he would compare this to the clock on his iPage. When six hours had passed and still the sun was climbing its way towards the zenith of local high noon, Hank realized that the days on this world were longer than Earth's 24-hour days—or Mars's 24.5-hour days, for that matter. That was a factoid that he could reasonably tuck away in a corner of his brain somewhere between "not-terribly-useful curiosity" and "more proof (as if the breathable air, red sun, and three moons in the sky weren't enough) that he was definitely not on Mars anymore."

Hank had plenty of time for idle thoughts like that as he hiked. Sure, he could have used his computer to queue up some music to help while away the hours. His iPage was, for all intents and purposes, his sole worldly possession now, apart from the clothes on his back; and he was clinging onto that little piece of technology for dear life, a solitary bit of comfort and home. But he avoided using it too much, because he was wary of two things. The first was battery life: the side of the device opposite the screen was a high-efficiency solar panel, but Hank wasn't sure yet whether this planet's red sunlight was sufficient to charge the computer while it was in-use. The second was simple caution of his unfamiliar surroundings: for the moment, Hank preferred to avoid distractions.

That didn't stop his mind from wandering, though. He tried to ignore the heat, and the shortness of breath from the thin air, and the headache induced by low oxygen, and his thirst, and his hunger, and the fact that his thoughts were constantly turning to internal grumbling about the unfairness of his situation—blaming Emily, blaming himself. Blaming the whole stupid human race for sending him to Mars on a Hail Mary "save the world from climate change" mission. He wondered whether he ought to be cataloging every little thing he saw; taking photographs for posterity. After all, even all this orange moss was the scientific discovery of a lifetime to _somebody_ back home, right? Maybe he should have been keeping a log—recording voice-entries every so often, so that someone could study it if he ever found his way back home. Or if he ever got back and needed to write a memoir.

Or if he died here, and some other humans followed him years later and found his desiccated remains.

Hank tried to clamp down on morbid thoughts and not dwell on unwelcome possibilities. He was _not_ going to lay down and die. There were people back on Earth—friends, relatives—people he would give anything to see again. He wasn't about to disappoint _them_ by giving up.

It was after he'd been pressing on for eight hours (and it was _finally_ afternoon on this planet), long after Hank had wondered for the hundredth damned time why he hadn't found so much as a trickle of water yet, and just about when he was starting to wonder whether he had the right to name this planet whatever he liked, that he spied something in the distance.

It was just a black speck on the horizon, way out across the plains, but there was _something_ out there. It was the first thing he'd seen all day that broke up the endless, flat scenery of the steppe.

Having little better to do (and hoping that he wasn't just seeing some sort of mirage induced by delirium from the heat), Hank altered his heading and started plodding in the direction of the distant black—structure, or whatever it was.

* * *

Hank was tired. It took his every last ounce of willpower to keep putting one foot in front of the other. He had been awake for—he didn't know, and didn't particularly care to know, how many hours now.

He was disappointed, too. He had been hoping for a building or something, some sign of civilization other than the stone vault in the hills that he'd awakened in. But, no; it wasn't to be. As Hank approached his goal, he discovered that the "thing" in the distance turned out to be more plantlife. Specifically, a copse of black-topped trees. Or giant mushrooms. Giant mushroom-trees? Whatever they were, they stood over ten meters tall, and they looked a whole lot like mushrooms with caps of dark gray or black. They also had delicate-looking vines dangling down from underneath the caps, giving them the appearance of weeping willows. Or like giant jellyfish perched atop thick, stalk-like trunks.

Hank sank down to his hands and knees. He needed rest. He needed food. He needed water most of all. But right now? He'd settle for some shade.

Idly, he brushed aside some of the orange moss-stuff on the ground and took a fistful of soil into his hand. It was reddish-brown and very fine, like clay, but desert-dry. Hank couldn't imagine a fungus as large as those mushroom-trees surviving in soil like this. But then, the tops of their caps were the same dark gray as the leaves of those shrubs that grew in the foothills. Maybe they were photosynthetic?

Whatever they were, Hank was wary of them. He stood up again, brushed the dust off his knees, and headed into the grove. But as he crept between the trees, he made a point to avoid touching the dangling vines. They had a look about them that he simply didn't like.

A little ways into the copse of mushroom-things, Hank spied something else that nearly had him jumping for joy: a pool. Well, more of a puddle really, more or less in the middle of the grove. But it certainly looked like _water_. It was surrounded by large clumps of orange moss, some of those woody black-leafed shrubs, and knobby red bulb-shaped plants that reminded Hank of cacti or puffball mushrooms. There was no sign of any fauna anywhere, though.

Hank didn't care about that; he just hoped against hope that the water was safe to drink. He dropped his computer in his excitement, scrambled over to the side of pool, and got down on his hands and knees. The water was clear and probably much cooler than the air; but before Hank touched it, he sniffed at it—and he detected a bitter, almondy scent. That gave Hank pause. Wasn't there a mineral toxin that smelled like almonds? Cyanide, or maybe arsenic? One of the famous ones that mystery writers liked to use in their novels.

Hank debated internally. He was _so_ thirsty. It would be so very easy just to scoop up a handful of water and drink his fill. But there could be poisons, there could be microbes. He had no way to boil the water, and even then, that would only deal with bacteria, not the presence of toxic chemicals.

On the other hand, what choice did Hank have? It was either drink what water he could find on this planet, or die of thirst. And if there was no potable water anywhere to be found on this world, then he was as good as dead anyway.

He reached for the water, internally terrified, but unable to resist any longer.

And then all hell broke loose.

The ground under Hank's knees gave a sharp rumble, and _something_ very big and very ugly burst forth from the puddle, scattering water and mud in all directions. It looked like a giant lobster- or scorpion-claw on the end of a chitin-plated arm, bigger than a grown man, and mottled in sickly yellow and green. With blinding speed, the enormous pincer shot at Hank, grabbing for the hapless human.


	6. Quintessence of Dust

If Hank had had his full wits about him, he would have been reminded of certain carnivorous life-forms found on earth, like the trapdoor spider or the Venus flytrap. But those analogies didn't occur to him quite yet; he was a little too preoccupied at the moment.

With a cry of alarm, Hank dove to one side. _THUNK_ —the huge claw sank both of its pincers deeply into the dirt where he had just been kneeling, and then they closed with a violent snap, carving a gouge into the soil the size of the human's torso. It was all hank could do to roll away from the claw as it came after him again— _snap! snap! snap!_ —it was coming closer with each attempt to grab him.

Hank stumbled up onto his hands and knees again, only for the claw to flail in his direction and smack him across the forehead. He went flying backwards and landed supine, grunting as the wind got knocked out of his lungs. Then the pincer snapped at the air again, hovering just above Hank, rearing back for the fatal strike—

In full panic mode, Hank twisted his body and threw up his limbs, using his legs to brace against one pincer and gripping the other with his hands. The claw tried to close; Hank pushed back. Now it was a contest of pure strength, the creature's claw tightening like a vise, and Hank's limbs locked with his muscles starting to burn.

They were the perfectly ordinary, everyday sort of muscles possessed by a university professor who also happened to be just healthy enough to make his way through a NASA training regimen and go into space. But those muscles had evolved under terrestrial gravity, on _Earth_.

Hank's face contorted with effort; he let out a primal cry; and with one mighty heave, he _pushed_ — _CRACK!_ —the chitinous plating gave way. Meat and sinew tore asunder, and a gush of yellow blood splattered all over Hank's chest. He had rent one of the pincers cleanly off, the way a diner in a seafood restaurant might tear apart a lobster claw.

Down in some dark, dank cave deep under the surface, the body of this abominable _thing_ , whatever it was, shook hard enough to cause the ground under Hank's backside to rumble. It let out a hideous, high-pitched shriek of pain; and the wounded arm retreated back into its hole, leaking a trail of neon-yellow ichor the whole way.

Hank sat up, breathing heavily, his heart still thumping fast from the rush of adrenaline. He then noticed three things in rapid succession. First, he was still alive and in one piece. Second, the pool was gone, with a muddy hole in the ground now sitting in its place, all the water having drained away and down into whatever cavern the creature's armor-plated arm had retreated into. Third, his shirt was sizzling and starting to smell funny.

"Yeeaugh!" Hank gave another surprised shout, tore off the garment, and flung it away. Panicking again, he groped for some clumps of the orange lichen-stuff and used it to wipe the remaining splatters of acidic critter-blood off of his hands and his upper body. Even still, Hank developed some downright nasty-looking acid-burns on his wrists and across his chest, streaky white splotches on his skin that hurt like hell. It was a sharp and nearly constant pain.

Wincing, Hank stood and slowly schlepped over to where he'd thrown his shirt. It was nothing more than a tatter of rags now; useless. His face and arms were already sunburned from today's long hike across the steppe. Now it seemed that his shoulders and back would be doomed to the same fate.

He looked around; where had his computer gone? Then he spotted it. _Just great_ , he thought. His iPage had landed underneath the canopy of the nearest creepy-looking jellyfish-mushroom-tree. He wanted to be gone from this place, lest the claw-creature come back out of its mudhole. But he wasn't about to leave his computer, his sole remaining tool and reminder of Earth.

Careful to avoid touching the plantlike organism's dangling tentacle-vines, he got down low to the ground and crawled underneath the mushroom-tree's cap. As quickly as he was able, he scrambled over to his computer and snatched it up. At the same time, the tree-thing gave a shudder, and the cap began to descend and contract, to close down around the stalk like a great umbrella.

"Of fucking course," grumbled Hank. With his computer-screen clutched close to his body, he dashed headlong into the curtain of vines, the bottom tips of which were just now starting to brush against the ground. He tried to force his way through; the vines didn't sting him like jellyfish-tentacles the way he'd feared they might, but they did _stick_ to his body—they were secreting some sort of resin that acted like a natural adhesive.

"Why," shouted Hank, "does every last fucking thing on this planet _want to eat me!?_ " One step at a time, he slowly dragged himself away from the mushroom-tree, even as the cap closed behind him and shivered again. The tentacle-vines didn't let go, though. More pissed off than frightened, Hank gave a roar of exertion and plowed ahead, tugging at the vines behind him. He strained against the sticky bonds, using up his last remaining ounces of strength—and finally, one of the vines snapped free, followed by another, and another, until they'd all been pulled right off the mushroom-cap.

* * *

Hank staggered away from the "oasis", dead tired and barely able to stay on his feet. He peeled the vines off his skin one by one; they left angry red welts behind once they were torn away.

The sun was still pretty high up in the sky at this point. Hank cupped one hand over his eyes and scanned the horizon. Except for the hills and mountains in the distance to the "west", every direction across the steppe looked the same. So, not wanting to retread any ground he'd already covered, Hank once again put the mountains to his left and started "north".

On he plodded, one achingly slow step after another.

* * *

According to his clock, twelve hours had passed since Hank had started out from the vault. The sun was at last getting lower in the sky, descending towards those distant mountains. It appeared to be about the middle of the afternoon on this planet.

For the umpteenth time since leaving the grove, Hank sat down on the ground to rest. It was a hard thing to catch his breath in this thin air. It was a harder thing still to will himself to get back up and keep going. It was hardest of all not knowing whether he'd ever actually find anything worth finding.

He still had that headache. He was thirstier than he'd ever been in his life.

And he was starting to give up hope.

Hank leaned all the way back and rested his head on the dusty ground. He wondered how long could he afford to lie here and rest. He wondered whether he could name the planet after himself. He vaguely recalled an old episode of _Star Trek_ involving a "Sherman's Planet". Maybe he could call this one "Swanson's Planet"? After all, he was the first ever human to set foot here.

No, wait, check that. Pyotr Lenkov had arrived here at the same time as Hank. And he'd given his life for the mission. Pyotr—and Emily, for all that Hank knew—were the first ever human beings to die en route to a distant star-system. Maybe he should name the planet after one of them.

In the end, he decided against it. It seemed too damnably arrogant to name an entire alien planet after one person. And too depressing to name it after one of his dead colleagues—or after himself, for that matter, because it implied that he really was all alone on this world.

Still lying on the ground, Hank turned his head so that his cheek rested on the soil. Then he noticed that not far away, growing amongst the orange mossy-stuff, there sat a cluster of those red sphere-shaped plants, the ones that looked like cacti without the spines.

A thought occurred to him.

He rolled over and crawled to the nearest one. Placing his hands on ether side of the red, fleshy orb, he yanked it out of the ground. The roots came up out of the loose soil easily. Hank examined the plant. It certainly _felt_ like a cactus. He shook it; something sloshed. He looked around, but there were no sticks or rocks nearby that he could use to bash the thing. So he decided to break it over his knee. _Please work,_ he thought to himself several times. He then slammed the plant against his thigh several times, and after a few good whacks, a crack appeared in the tough outer rind. Like a madman, he tore it open the rest of the way; and sure enough, the inside contained some sort of juicy pulp.

Hank prodded at the plant-flesh and then examined his finger. Well, at least it wasn't acidic and burning. Then he took up a fistful of the pulp and sniffed at it. It had a subtle, sweet smell. Like nectar. "This," said Hank aloud, "is either fantastically brilliant or _really_ fucking stupid." He cupped his other hand and squeezed the cactus-juice into his palm; then, before he could convince himself to do otherwise, he drank it.

The plant-juice tasted like… well, flavorless plant-water. It wasn't all that bad, really. Especially after a twelve-hour hike across an arid, alien steppe. Hank savored the feeling of the liquid running down his throat—

And then his stomach _immediately_ rebelled. He felt a sharp pain in his guts, keeled over, and vomited everything back up again.

 _Well,_ thought Hank bitterly, dry-heaving on his hands and knees, _that didn't work_.

But it wasn't over. About thirty seconds after he'd finally stopped retching, Hank started _tripping balls_. Over the next several minutes, he saw pretty colors; inexplicable wonders; cosmic horrors. And then he lost consciousness.

It wouldn't occur to him until much later that a cactus without spines should most likely have evolved an entirely separate defense mechanism.

* * *

Hank came to a few hours later. It was evening now: the sun was low over the mountaintops in the west. Hank's head was pounding: he couldn't tell whether it was the soroche or a hangover.

As he lay on the ground and came back to himself, Hank found that he was circling around a final decision. He was going to start calling this place "Planet Hellhole"; or maybe "Planet Crapsack". Of course, "Planet Shitstain" had a certain elegant ring to it.

Just then, a faint tremor ran through Hank's body—followed by another, and then another. Soon enough, Hank realized that it wasn't _him_ that was vibrating; it was the ground. He fought to sit up. All of his muscles protested; and those fucking acid-burns still smarted, although now it was more of a dull throb.

He groaned as he stood up—and then he boggled at what he saw.

Not too far away, maybe two-hundred meters or so, a huge herd of animals was stampeding across the plain. And the ground was getting shakier: the herd was getting closer. They weren't moving directly at Hank, but if they kept going in the direction that they were going, they would definitely come close enough to make the human very nervous.

Nevertheless, Hank was curious; and so he stood his ground. When the herd came to within fifty meters, he could make out some details of what the beasts looked liked. They were brownish-green and scaly, built rather like oxen or bison, but with six legs, extremely elongated snouts, and ridges of knobby horn-like growths atop their heads.

 _Gator-bison?_ Hank thought to himself. _Okay; that works. They're gator-bison._

Eventually, the herd stormed its way past Hank, with only a few smaller individuals straggling behind the main group. It was then that Hank discovered what was probably causing the stampede: there was a pack of predators nipping at the stragglers' heels. These things were about half the size of the gator-bison, but they were also scaly and six-limbed. Lizard-wolves? _Sure, why not,_ Hank decided. _Lizard-wolves._

He watched in rapt fascination as the pack-animals finally overtook one of the herd-beasts. They actually brayed—like a cross between a jackal's howl and a hyena's laugh—and all fell upon the helpless creature, quickly tearing it apart.

They were barely thirty meters away from Hank, who now decided that discretion was probably the better part of valor. He took one step back, and then another, all the while keeping his eyes fixed on the feasting pack.

Then one of the circling pack-animals glanced his way and stared. Hank saw yellow eyes—looking right at him.

_Oh shit._

The lizard-wolf let out a high-pitched yowl, getting the attention of the rest of his pack. A few were lazily munching on the remains of the fallen gator-bison, but most of them now turned their attention to Hank.

Hank turned tail and ran. Even though he knew that he didn't have the stamina to keep up a sprint for long. Even though he knew that the alien predators would quickly overtake him.

The braying pack of lizard-wolves yipped and snarled and gave chase.


	7. Beheld the Incomparable

Hank dashed across the flat landscape with graceless, bounding strides. Even after a full day of hiking, he hadn't quite gotten used to walking in this low gravity, never mind running full-tilt. But having a pack of snarling predators hot on his heels certainly did wonders for his motivation to learn. He noticed very quickly that his boots caught more purchase on the dirt than on the orange moss, so he tried his best to avoid the clumps of vegetation and spring from one patch of bare earth to another as he fled.

The predators' high-pitched yips were getting closer. Hank didn't know how much longer his body could hold out. He was exhausted, literally sick and tired, and the stitch in his side forced him to slow from a dash to a jog at just about the same time that the pack caught up to him and surrounded him. In seconds flat, he found himself encircled by at least a dozen growling, prowling lizard-wolves.

The creatures pawed at the ground and sniffed the air in Hank's direction. Apparently, the human had quite the unfamiliar scent—enough to give the lizard-wolves momentary pause. But that didn't stop them from deciding that Hank was prey. They drew in closer, tightening the circle.

Hank had let his iPage drop to the ground; he was almost doubled over, hands on his sides, gasping for breath. His vision swam for just a moment—the sparse oxygen was really starting to take its toll.

One of the braver lizard-wolves—or maybe it was just hungrier—crept ahead of the others, entering the circle formed by its fellows. Hank looked this way and that, but in every direction, there were only claws and scales and wide, salivating reptile-mouths filled with jagged, wolfish teeth.

Hank slowly put up his hands. "Nice reptile-doggo… niiice lizard-wolf-thing… you don't wanna eat _me_ , do ya, boy?"

The creature didn't appear to have external ears, but its head did perk up when Hank spoke. Then it yowled, and the other circling predators started braying and warbling along with it. Immediately, the first lizard-wolf darted at Hank, jaws snapping, drool flying, and Hank reacted quickly—by kicking the beast like a teed-up football.

It was a kick to make an NFL talent-scout proud. The lizard-wolf went flying; it landed in a crumpled heap; and it didn't move again.

Hank didn't have time to process how astonished he was. Most of the lizard-wolves, sensing that this particular prey posed them some threat after all, backed off a bit—but the biggest and meanest of the lot stayed put, sizing up the human. If the pack had an alpha, this one was it. It stared at Hank with unblinking, reptilian eyes. Its muscles tensed, readying for the pounce.

Hank stood with his legs wide apart, keeping his center of gravity low. He waited, rooted to the ground.

And then something perfectly extraordinary happened. A different lizard-wolf entirely, one of the predators circling around behind Hank, lunged at him. The alpha attacked at the same time. But it was the _twang_ of a distant bowstring, the _zip_ of the arrow, and the _thunk_ of the arrowhead striking the sneaky, back-attacking lizard-wolf that really got Hank's attention.

Not that he had time to process that part either; the alpha-predator fell upon Hank, its snarling jaws snapping in his face. The human caught the lizard-wolf around the neck, and they both fell to the ground, each wrestling the other for the upper hand in a life-or-death struggle. Hank felt the creature's front and middle paws claw into his skin, and he cried out in pain. At the same time, he tightened his grip on the lizard-wolf, and he started to squeeze.

The predator's eyes bugged in its sockets; Hank's eyes were shut tight, his face scrunched up with effort. The lizard-wolf didn't bray or snap its jaws anymore—now it was just struggling to breathe. Slowly, Hank felt the creature's bones and tendons give way to his grip, until, with one final and sickening _SNAP_ , it fell dead in his arms.

Hank rolled up into a kneeling position, breathing heavily. It was now the lizard-wolves' turn to be frozen in place—with three of their number dead, they were actually cautious now, reluctant to approach Hank any closer.

Once he'd finally caught his breath, Hank rose to his feet, faced down the pack-animals, and screamed a wordless yell at the top of his lungs. At the same time, he raised up his arms to make himself look bigger, and he kicked at the ground, sending up a plume of dust. The lizard-wolves backed away a few feet, but still they kept their attention on Hank and didn't flee.

As for Hank, he was riding high on a serious adrenaline-rush now. His limbs were all but spent; but his heart was pounding, and he could practically hear his own blood pumping. "That's fucking right!" he shouted, once again crouching low and waiting for the next predator to strike. "Who wants some o' this!? Who wants some more!?" He paused mid-tirade to catch his breath and look from one lizard-wolf to another. "Come at me! I'm ready for you bastards—and I have had a very. Bad. Day!"

Then, suddenly, all of the remaining lizard-wolves perked up and looked off into the distance. They were all staring in the same direction; a few of them sniffed at the air. Hank turned and looked too: the arrow had come from that way.

Whatever was coming, that was it for the pack-predators. They fled, growling and warbling, and disappeared into the twilight.

In the fading light of dusk, Hank couldn't make out many details. But he could tell that the figure coming towards him, simple hunting-bow in hand, was _humanoid_ —and it was walking across the plains with measured, confident strides. A white cloak and hood concealed the newcomer's head and body; but Hank could clearly see the glint of two yellow eyes peaking out from underneath that hood, and they looked no less predatory than those of the lizard-wolves.

A jumble of thoughts ran through Hank's overly-fatigued mind just then. There were people on this planet! Was he saved? Was he about to be killed? Anyway, he was about to meet an alien. A real, live alien! It was a first in human history; the scientific achievement of the millennium; and quite possibly, the greatest moment of Hank's life. A watershed moment for all humankind that handily surpassed Armstrong landing on the Moon.

Grandiose thoughts aside, right now Hank was more concerned with base needs of survival than he was thrilled at the notion of discovery. He was not by any means a religious man; but here and now, in this desperate moment, he was willing to pray to every god ever worshipped on Earth that the locals were biologically similar enough to humans that they drank _water_.

When the alien was about twenty meters away, it waved a hand called out to Hank. _"Galâh, ezhahi! Dhe eskai—takh nâh?"_ The alien's voice was raspy to Hank's ears and contralto in pitch; its language, guttural and syllabic.

Something stopped Hank from replying just then. Maybe it was the excitement of the moment; maybe it was the sore lump in his throat, courtesy of the dryness and all the recent yelling. But he did manage to wave back as the alien came closer.

Doing that made the several fresh cuts and gashes on his chest and belly sting like a bitch. Hank winced in pain and used both hands to put some pressure on the ugliest of his newest wounds.

When the alien came within five meters, it stopped, eyes widening in surprise. It dropped the bow and fumbled to draw a bronze knife. _"Shatosh!"_ exclaimed the alien, its voice tinged with panic. _"Eskai… GÛLGH!"_

Hank threw up his hands in what he hoped was a universal gesture of non-threatening surrender. "Whoa-whoa-woah, there! Hold on—I'm unarmed, I'm unarmed!"

 _"Ska-thu! Gûlgh!"_ The alien brandished the knife threateningly, but it was obvious even to Hank that this being was downright _terrified_ of him.

Hank kept his hands up and didn't move from where he stood. "I won't—dammit, I don't wanna hurt you," he said, trying to keep his tone as even as he could manage. "I just—need some way to communicate—" He looked around, and his eyes fell upon the third dead lizard-wolf, the one with the alien archer's arrow still sticking out of its side.

Slowly, deliberately, and with no sudden movements, Hank made a show of keeping one hand up in the air while he knelt down next to the fallen pack-animal and pulled out the arrow. The arrowhead was also bronze, and fairly small—smaller than the broadheads used for game this size on Earth. Hank was honestly impressed that this archer had felled the predator so cleanly in one shot.

While the alien stared, Hank carefully wiped the critter-blood off the arrowhead using his pant-leg. Then, holding the arrow out in two hands, he knelt down and presented it to the alien. "Here," he said. "You probably want this back. Nice shot, by the way." Without taking his eyes off the alien, Hank bobbed his head in the direction of the dead predator. "You probably saved my life. Thank you."

The alien didn't move for several seconds. Then it cautiously crept forward, still pointing the knife at Hank. Once it came close enough, it snatched its arrow back—here, Hank noted that the alien's hand was _green_ , with sharp black claws where a human had fingernails—before skittishly darting away from the human again.

"God, you're jumpy," said Hank, standing up.

The alien was no less talkative. _"Shkai, dho kzâkh bher! Nêh-wih vêl ish thu-yûm?"_

Hank wiped his face in mounting frustration. "Right. We're gonna need a baseline to work from here. Okay, how about this?" He sat down on the ground, crossed his legs, and picked up a handful of dusty red soil. Then he pointed at it and said "Dirt." He repeated himself a few times.

Quickly enough, the alien got the message. It knelt down, picked up its own handful of dirt, and uttered the word, _"Urd."_

 _"Urd,"_ echoed Hank, pointing at the dirt.

The alien slowly nodded.

 _I sure hope that means "yes" in their culture,_ thought Hank. Then he tried something else: he picked up a clump of the orange moss-lichen-stuff. "Moss," he said. "Moss."

 _"Khaz,"_ said the alien carefully. The first consonant was a voiceless fricative uttered from the back of the mouth, but Hank was a linguist—he didn't have any problem repeating the proper pronunciation.

"Okay," said Hank with a chuckle. "Now I know that I hate the sight of _khaz_. What's next? How about water?" He cupped his hands together and tried to mime drinking, while at the same time making obvious "gulp-gulp, glug-glug" sounds. "Water," he said again, repeating the motion. "Water?"

The alien stared for a while, not seeming to comprehend; until at last it exclaimed, _"Tzêh! Nêh bhah-ka tzêh!"_ From somewhere within its cloak, the alien withdrew what appeared to be a waterskin made from cured reptile-hide. _"Tzêh?"_ it repeated.

 _"Tzêh,"_ said Hank, testing the alien word on his tongue. _"Tzêh!"_ Excitedly, he held out his arms and mimed for the alien to give him the waterskin.

The alien seemed to be a little calmer now. Perhaps it was finally picking up on the idea that Hank was at the very least trying to seem harmless. It set the waterskin down about a meter away from Hank and then backed off again.

Hank almost couldn't help himself. He scrambled over to the waterskin, picked it up, undid the stopper, and sniffed at the opening. He didn't smell anything. So he tasted the contents—yes! It was water! With nary a thought spared for toxins or microbes, he swallowed down several cool, heavenly mouthfuls, all the while hoping that he appeared more grateful than greedy.

The alien mumbled something to itself in a pensive tone. Hank stopped drinking and realized to his shame that he had downed nearly half of the waterskin's contents. Sheepishly, he stoppered it up again and set it down on the ground. "Thank you," he said again. "I sure hope you can get more of that around here."

 _"Bhe-shi pekh nâh."_ The alien heaved a dramatic sigh, shook its head, and picked up the waterskin. Then it went over to where it had dropped its hunting-bow and retrieved that too.

Hank took the opportunity to look around for his discarded computer: it wasn't far away, so he picked it up, rolled the flexible screen into a tube, and stuck that into the waistband of his pants behind his back.

That accomplished, he went back over to where the alien was standing. The archer was gazing west, watching as the sun started to sink down behind the mountains.

Now that he was standing next to the alien, Hank could see that his new acquaintance was noticeably taller and lankier than he was—slender of build, and with a good six inches of height on Hank. "Gonna be dark soon," he said.

The alien said something. Hank wasn't sure, but it felt like a similar sentiment.

"Anyway, since we're friends now, I think we should get to know each other." Hank pointed at himself and slowly articulated his own name several times.

The alien stared. _"Henkh?"_ it tried.

"No, no. Hard 'k.' Hank. _Hank._ Got it?"

_"Hen-kuh?"_

"Close enough." He pointed at the alien. "How about you? What's your name?"

The alien blinked and pointed at its own chest. _"Urdakh."_

"Urdock?"

_"An-skâ! URDAKH!"_

"Okay, okay! _Urdakh._ Guess it's not all _that_ hard to say." Hank held out one hand to shake. "Nice to meet you, Urdakh."

Urdakh did not take Hank's proffered hand. Instead, the alien ignored the human and went over to where a cluster of those black-leafed shrubs were growing. While Hank watched, curious, Urdakh started snapping off dry branches and heaping them into a tidy pile.

"Oh, I get it," said Hank. "That's firewood, right? Good idea!"

Urdakh stopped what it was doing, glowered at Hank, and then waved an open hand at each of the dead lizard-wolves in turn. _"Uzh nêh-tî zal zêh-wâh, 'Hen-kuh,' nâh vel-ko zhî bi-zhom."_

Hank stared blankly. "The lizard-wolves? What about them?"

Urdakh pointed at the dead predators again, more forcefully this time, clearly saying _"Bi-zhom!"_ for each one. Then the alien pointed to a spot at its feet, next to the kindling pile.

"You want me to drag the—the _'bi-zhom'_? Is that how you say it?—the _bi-zhom_ over here?"

Urdakh ignored Hank, mumbled something, and went back to collecting firewood.

Hank's eyes widened as realization dawned. The _bi-zhom_ were about to be _dinner_. "Circle of life," he muttered to himself. "Eat or be eaten. But… God _damn_ it, these things are gonna taste gamey as hell, aren't they?"

Ultimately, Hank decided that roasted space-monster sounded better than nothing, and so he went to do Urdakh's bidding and collect the dead animals.


	8. Harmonices Mundi

Hank unceremoniously dropped the three dead _bi-zhom_ at Urdakh's feet.

Urdakh said something in a very surprised tone.

"What? They weren't heavy."

Urdakh peered at Hank from underneath its cowl-like hood, mulling something over and assessing the human. (Now that Hank was standing right next to the alien, he could see that its garment was made from some kind of scaly white reptile-hide.) Then, arriving at a decision, Urdakh drew out its bronze hunting knife again and offered the blade to Hank, pointing at the downed game.

"Uh… why don't _you_ do that," said Hank, refusing the knife. "I'd probably just make a mess of it. You know, slice open an organ I'm not supposed to, something like that."

Urdakh answered in a reproachful tone and then, grumbling under its breath, set to the business of field-dressing the _bi-zhom_ carcasses.

"Great," said Hank. "And while you're doing that… I guess I'll work on the fire."

The human started looking around for stones, gathering them together in a small pile near the kindling-heap that Urdakh had made. Every once in a while, Urdakh would pause what it was doing to glance at Hank curiously, and then go back to butchering the animals. Hank, meanwhile, selected a large stone that was flat enough to dig with and made a shallow fire-pit, which he then ringed with most of the remaining stones.

"There we are," said Hank with a laugh. "Just like camping in the Rockies back home." He started breaking shrub-branches in half and heaping them in the middle of the pit in a small pile; then he arranged several more sticks in a conical shape on top of those.

By the time Hank was done with that, Urdakh had already made expert work of the _bi-zhom_ , having removed and cast aside the entrails and turned the carcasses over to drain. The alien then said something to Hank and pointed at the rest of the unused firewood.

Hank gestured at the kindling-pile. "You need some sticks?"

Urdakh nodded, uttered a sharp word of reply, and made a "give me" motion.

Hank picked up several branches and passed them to Urdakh, who remained seated on the ground next to the freshly-dressed _bi-zhom_. While Hank watched, the alien began sharpening the sticks one by one with its knife.

"Aha. Roasting spits. Gotcha."

The sun was well behind the mountains by now, and they were losing the light quickly. Hank was eager to get a fire going; but the only rocks he had at hand were soft, like sandstone, with none of them even remotely resembling flint. "Oh well. Work with what you've got." He tried striking two of the rocks together and got plenty of noise but no sparks.

Hank looked up in surprise when Urdakh said something in a mirthful tone and started _laughing_ at him. Though the human had no means of understanding precisely what was said, he got the gist of it: _you'll never make a fire that way, dumbass!_

Hank offered Urdakh the two stones. "I'd like to see you do better!"

The alien said something softly. Then, from underneath its cloak, Urdakh produced a very full, very heavy-looking hide knapsack; opened a flap; and began rummaging around in its contents.

"Oh, of course," said Hank. "You're a hunter; you've probably got a tinderbox in there, don't you?"

But instead of a tinderbox, and very much to Hank's surprise, Urdakh withdrew from its pack a different instrument entirely. It was about the size and general shape of a pocket-flashlight, metallic, with faceted gemstones set into the side. Hank watched in fascination as Urdakh held the object about six inches away from the firewood, depressed one of the gemstones, and— _bzzt!_ —a visible red laser-beam instantly ignited a small blaze. The dry branches caught quickly, and pretty soon a cheerful campfire was crackling away in the pit.

"Holy _crap_!" said Hank. "That's… okay, wow, so maybe your people are a little more sophisticated than the Bronze Age."

Urdakh held up the device and said, _"Eskai ten-vâh!"_ with a merry chuckle.

Hank held out his hand, palm up. "Hey. Can I take a look at that?"

Urdakh responded by clutching the fire-starter closely to its chest. _"An-skâ! Ten-vâh ko-tlû-akh!"_

Hank grimaced and backed off. "Okay, okay. Sorry, forget I asked."

Urdakh gave Hank a wary look and then stowed the instrument back in the knapsack. Then the alien took out its knife again, went over to one of the _bi-zhom_ , and started cutting away strips of flesh, putting them on spits, and setting them to roast over the fire.

Hank, meanwhile, sat back and prodded a finger at cuts on his midsection. Most of them were shallow and already clotted, but a couple of the wider gashes still bled. "Hey, Urdakh?"

The alien finished what it was doing and gave Hank a questioning look.

Hank pointed to his wounds and said, "I need to clean these. Can have some more water? More _tzêh_?"

Urdakh seemed to understand what Hank was getting at. Muttering something in annoyance, the alien fished a scrap of cloth from the knapsack, used the waterskin to dampen it, and passed the cloth to Hank.

"Thanks," said Hank. He started washing the cuts and murmured quietly to himself, "No antiseptic. Here's hoping the bacteria on this planet don't like living in my bloodstream."

While Hank tended to his wounds and the meat roasted on the spits—it gave off a savory smell that had the human's mouth watering—Urdakh finally took the opportunity to rest. The hunter sat down by the campfire opposite Hank, pulled back its hood and removed its cloak.

Hank finished with what he was doing and commented, "I think these deeper cuts will heal just fine. No need to cauterize 'em with your laser-doohickey—" He stopped speaking abruptly when he glanced up and finally got a good look at Urdakh for the first time. "Huh. You're a girl."

* * *

Intellectually, Hank knew that had no real basis upon which to guess at the gender of the alien sitting across the fire from him. Urdakh might very well be male; or a member of a species with only one gender, or even three or more. But to his prejudiced human eyes, she was undeniably feminine in appearance. She had long hair, black and wavy. Her face sported full lips and high cheekbones. Her figure was concealed by a form-fitting tunic or dress made from hide that went down to her knees; but Hank was pretty certain that she had hips and a bustline that were just a bit wider than her waist. In fact, the adjective "Amazonian" came unbidden to his mind.

That said, nobody would ever mistake Urdakh for a human woman. Her skin was green; her eyes were downright unsettling, with yellow irises and blood-red scleras. She had two little tusks jutting up from behind her lower lip, and when she grinned, Hank could see that her upper canines were actually fangs. A series of ridges ran up the length of her flat and upturned nose; once they reached her forehead, they became bony protrusions that almost looked like a row of tiny horns. She had long, black claws on both her hands and feet (and she wore no shoes or sandals of any sort). It was her legs and feet that Hank found strangest of all: they were digitigrade, so that when Urdakh sat on the ground and scrunched her legs up beneath her, it appeared to the human as if she had a second set of knees that bent the wrong way.

A digitigrade biped didn't make much evolutionary sense to Hank, but then again, this planet did have weaker gravity than Earth… so what did he know? Maybe Urdakh's species had evolved to favor speed over endurance.

More than anything else, though, Hank was astounded at the apparent similarities between Urdakh's species and his own. Sure, she clearly wasn't human; but she was definitely some kind of hominoid-equivalent. (That said, just from looking at her, Hank couldn't help but compare Urdakh to a green Klingon. Or maybe some kind of space-orc.)

Urdakh had been tending to the meat, turning the spits to ensure that it roasted evenly, the whole time that Hank stared and contemplated. Now she judged that it was done; she took some of the skewers for herself and offered the rest to Hank, along with a lengthy string of words in a conversational tone.

Hank waited for the meat to cool before pulling a hunk off the spit. After the day he'd had, it smelled absolutely fantastic. "This'll be the first thing I've eaten all day," he said. "Hell, as a matter of fact, it'll be the first real non-astronaut food I'll have had in about two months."

Urdakh looked at Hank curiously and said something before tearing into the meat with those fangs of hers. Then she made an "icky" face, gulped the mouthful down, and took another bite.

Hank laughed. "It's that good, huh? Bet you were really out here chasing after those gator-bison." He tried a bite of the _bi-zhom_. It was very tough, but the flavor wasn't actually all that bad. "Chewy," he said with his mouth full. He swallowed and added, "I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but it really does taste like chicken." Then he gave Urdakh a frank look and said, "Anybody else here starting to feel like the _Stargate_ movie was a goddamn documentary? …No, just me? Alrighty then."

Urdakh said something back, but Hank didn't know how to respond, so he said nothing. They finished eating in silence.

Hank sensed the mood growing tense again once they'd finished. He patted his belly—now pleasantly full—and sighed with contentment. "Ya know, that's the best food I've had since I left Earth. Wanna know what my last meal before blastoff was? _Pepperoni_ motherfucking _pizza_. God, I miss pizza…"

As he rambled, Hank yanked off his boots and turned them upside-down. A downright obscene amount of sand and dust poured out of them. "Long day," he commented.

Urdakh threw away the last of the roasting-spits and then pointed at Hank's bare feet and said something in a tone that sounded almost—accusatory.

"Yeah, I'll bet mine look just as weird to you as yours do to me." He wiggled his toes and enjoyed the feeling of the cool night air on his aching feet.

Urdakh rested her chin in her hand—the gesture was so humanlike that Hank actually felt a lump of pure, homesick emotion form in his throat—and said thoughtfully, _"Eskai nâh ro gûlgh, Hen-kah?"_ Even though Hank heard her utter his name, he got the distinct impression that she wasn't so much addressing him as she was talking to herself _about_ him.

He shrugged. "No idea what you're talkin' about, Urdakh." Then he decided that it might be nice now to have a little fun. "How about some tunes?" He took out his iPage, unrolled it, and touched the screen, which caused it to light up as the desktop and icons appeared.

Urdakh's eyes widened in shock. _"Ten-vâh nêh!"_ she exclaimed, pointing at the computer.

Hank quirked an eyebrow. "You've said that word before." He held up the iPage and repeated, "Ten-va?"

Urdakh nodded. _"Ten-vâh ko-tlû-akh!"_

"Huh. Is that your word for technology, I wonder?" Hank touched the icon for the music player and swiped open his classic rock folder. "Now let's see here. What should your first taste of the classics be? Sabbath? Too hard. Queen? Nah, too weird… Aha! Perfect. And thematically appropriate." Hank touched the icon to queue up "Wayward Son" by Kansas.

At once, the melodious strains of electric guitars and keys filled the still night air and echoed across the steppe. Urdakh was startled at first, but soon enough she realized that the ghostly, artificial noises were coming from Hank's " _ten-vâh_ ".

She crawled around the fire and peered at the glowing screen. Hank swiped back to the desktop and then touched the icon for a text-editor and started typing. "I figure," he said by way of explanation, "if I want to learn your language, I'd better start compiling a glossary of all the words I'm learning from you." He quickly typed in the small vocabulary that he'd acquired so far. "If I get a good, working dictionary built up, maybe my translation algorithms will be able to go to town. Then we can hold a real conversation."

By now, Urdakh at least recognized that the music coming from Hank's iPage was, in fact, music. She said something to Hank, her voice filled with wonder.

Hank chuckled and said, "Yeah, rock'n'roll is pretty fantastic."

* * *

Over the course of the next hour, while Hank's playlist cycled from Journey to Rush to Zeppelin, he and Urdakh made a game of trading words. He would point at something, say the English word for that thing, and Urdakh would give Hank the alien word for it, which Hank would then add to his ever-growing glossary.

This continued until, at some point, as Hank was idly switching between apps, Urdakh reached out and caught his wrist to stop him from swiping away from the desktop. Hank looked at her questioningly.

Urdakh tapped the claw of her index finger on the screen, indicating Hank's desktop image. It was a close-up photograph of a little blonde-haired girl, maybe four years old, in adorable pink overalls. The girl was kicking a rubber ball; behind her stood the frame of a woman, presumably her mother; but the image was carefully cropped so that the woman's head was entirely out of sight. Urdakh asked Hank a question.

Hank stiffened and pursed his lips. "No," he said, shaking his head. "That's—that's my daughter, but we don't need to talk about her." He wrenched his hand free and quickly swiped back into his music player, stopping the Who mid-"Baba O'Riley". While Urdakh watched curiously, Hank rolled up his iPage and said, "No offence, but we've only just met."

Urdakh said something in what sounded to Hank like a flippant tone. He didn't like it. He shivered; it was getting really cold now. "Swingy temperatures on this planet," he griped. "Boiling hot all day, freezing cold at night? Planet Shitstain just gets better and better."

Urdakh went back over to her side of the fire, where she once again got into her knapsack; this time, she pulled out a hide blanket. She said something sharp and commanding, picked up her white cloak, and tossed it over to Hank. Then she stretched out on the ground next to the fire and curled up under her blanket.

Hank easily caught the cloak, understanding what Urdakh was saying: _use this or you'll freeze to death during the night._ "Thanks," he said. "Just, you know, please don't murder me in my sleep or anything, m'kay?" He lay down on the ground, spread the cloak out over his body, and all too quickly fell asleep.


	9. Hey Buffalo Gal

It was still nighttime when Hank awoke with a start. He shivered, curled up as he was underneath the borrowed hide cloak. The ground underneath him was hard and cold; the fire had long since died out. The night was frigid, but it wasn't completely dark: once Hank's eyes adjusted to the light of the three half-moons hanging low in the sky, he could see his own breath misting when he exhaled.

Hank's first thought was one of relief. _Hey, not dead. The food didn't kill me, the cold didn't kill me, and the green huntress didn't kill me, so… count it as a win?_ He sat up and stretched; his stiff joints protested and popped. _Well, that's what I get for sleeping on the ground instead of making a bed out of that orange_ khaz _stuff._

Still hugging Urdakh's cloak tightly around his body, he found his boots and put them on again. Then he stood up and groaned. _Whoa—head rush._ Almost at once, Hank noticed that his head was still aching. That honestly didn't surprise him; he knew that it could take a person upwards of two or three days to acclimate to a low-oxygen environment. Thankfully, the ache had subsided to a dull, persistent throb just behind his eyes that he could mostly ignore.

Feeling curious, he groped for his iPage and activated the screen. According to the clock, some thirteen hours had passed since sundown—he'd slept for nearly twelve of them. _Wow, I really must have been exhausted._

He was hungry, too. But he decided that it would be best if, before bothering Urdakh, he crept away from the campsite to find some privacy and take care of some human needs. He only hoped that the _khaz_ made for adequate toilet-paper.

* * *

Hank came back to find that Urdakh was already awake and had relit the campfire. "You're an early riser," he said.

Urdakh jumped and glanced up at the human. Then she grumbled something and went back to what she was doing, preparing more strips of _bi-zhom_ flesh and putting them on the skewers they'd used last night.

Hank sat down cross-legged by the fire and warmed himself. "Breakfast already, and it's not even the ass-crack of dawn yet. Shame we don't have any coffee."

Once the meat had finished roasting, they ate quickly and didn't say much to each other. To Hank, it seemed that Urdakh was in a hurry, or at least eager to get underway. She retrieved her waterskin, drank down half the contents, and offered the rest to Hank. He hesitated, but she gave Hank an exasperated look and gestured for him to drink. "If you insist," said Hank. He finished off the rest of the water and passed the empty skin back to Urdakh. She didn't seem particularly concerned that they were out of water now.

Then, while Hank watched, Urdakh folded up her hide blanket and the empty waterskin and stowed them both carefully in her pack. She removed from that same bag a tangle of reptile-leather thongs and a stout coil of woven rope. While she went about untangling the mess of leather straps, she said something to Hank and handed him the rope.

Hank took it and examined it. It was thick stuff, and a little bit tacky to the touch. In fact, he was pretty sure that it had been made from the sticky tentacle-vines of those jellyfish-trees.

Urdakh, meanwhile, knelt down next to the campfire and used its light to better see what she was doing. She lashed together the three _bi-zhom_ carcasses with the straps; then she held out her hand and demanded the rope back from Hank. He passed it over, and she tied it to the trussed-up animal-corpses. Finally, she rose to her feet and offered the rope back to Hank.

He took it and stared dumbly at Urdakh for several seconds. She made a pulling-motion with her empty hands and pointed off into the distance. Hank imitated the first gesture, tugging on the rope. "You want me to drag these things with us?"

Urdakh nodded.

Hank sighed. Dragging these three carcasses on this planet would be about the same as dragging one dead wolf back on Earth—easier for him than for her, to be sure, but still burdensome. "I guess that makes sense. Might as well make the big, strong Earthman do the heavy-lifting."

He turned and made ready to trudge off in the direction that Urdakh had indicated, but she stopped him with a sharp word. Then she said something in a reproachful tone and swatted Hank in the arm. "What? What'd I do?"

She pointed at her white cloak, which was still draped across Hank's shoulders.

"Oh. I s'pose you want this back, right?" He returned the cloak and shivered again when the freezing-cold morning air hit his bare skin.

Urdakh put her cloak back on. Then, taking up her knapsack, quiver, and bow, she led Hank off into the wilderness.

* * *

When dawn came, and the first signs of this planet's red alien sun appeared directly ahead of them on the horizon, Hank realized that Urdakh was leading him almost due east. He stopped just long enough to unroll his computer-screen and check the clock. Nearly thirty hours had passed since the last sunrise. He'd experienced a little less than fifteen hours of daylight, followed by fifteen more of darkness—nearly an even split. Which meant one of two things: either this planet didn't have much of an axial tilt and therefore didn't have seasons at all; or it just so happened that he'd arrived on this world on or very near to one of its equinoxes. He couldn't even begin to guess at which scenario was the more likely.

 _A thirty-hour day,_ he thought to himself. _That's gonna play havoc with my circadian rhythms for a while._ He resigned himself to the idea that he'd be grumpy and jetlagged for some time to come—and pressed on.

* * *

Temperatures rose quickly out on the steppe now that daylight had come. In short order, the morning went from pleasantly cool, to comfortably warm, to sweltering.

As they hiked, Urdakh would occasionally pause to show Hank a large footprint or a patch of _khaz_ that had been trampled flat. It didn't take long for Hank to gather that they were chasing after that herd of gator-bison—or, as Urdakh called them, _gerzhû_ —that he'd encountered just before his frightening run-in with the lizard-wolves. Clearly, Urdakh was quite the skilled tracker; she was reading signs in the land that Hank figured he'd never be able to notice in a million years.

The morning wore on. Hank and Urdakh played more of the word-game, trading their respective terms for anything that either of them could think of to point out or somehow demonstrate. From time to time, Hank would stop and use his iPage to record his new vocabulary, adding ever more words to his expanding little lexicon. He was eager to see that dictionary grow: the sooner he could turn his custom algorithms loose on it, the sooner he could properly converse with Urdakh and her people.

After several toilsome hours of travel across the plans, Hank's stomach started rumbling. Urdakh motioned for the two of them to stop; apparently, this was as good a time as any to take a rest.

They sat down on the ground together. From her pack, Urdakh took out two purple-colored root-vegetables and what appeared to be a couple of hardtack biscuits. She passed one of each item to Hank and started eating her own.

Hank was more wary of the vegetable than the hardtack. He ate the biscuit first—it was, indeed, very hard; downright difficult to bite into and chew; and very salty. Then he tried the purple root. It was bland, and maybe a little sweet. It certainly didn't remind him of anything he'd ever eaten on Earth. Except that it kind of looked like a cross between a turnip and a carrot.

"You know," said Hank as he munched on the root, "carrots on Earth used to be purple. Then we turned them orange, I guess because people liked them better that way." He glanced around; they were still surrounded by nothing but vast stretches of _khaz_ for as far as the eye could see. "…But after this, I'm starting to think I could go back to purple."

Urdakh said _something_ and laughed. Apparently, Hank wasn't the only one who appreciated a good one-sided conversation.

Then, of a sudden, the huntress leapt to her feet. She pulled back her hood and used one hand to shield her eyes from the sun, scanning the horizon. She sniffed at the air; whatever it was that she could smell, Hank certainly couldn't detect; but it seemed to please Urdakh. She quickly gathered up her things and motioned for Hank to follow.

"Guess break-time's over," said Hank. He took up the rope tied to the _bi-zhom_ again and followed after her.

* * *

They came upon a tiny moss-covered hillock that wasn't even as tall as Hank. Urdakh crouched down behind it; Hank followed suit. She peeked out over the top of the little ridge, sniffed the air again, and pointed. " _Gerzhû,_ " she said to Hank.

"Bless you."

Urdakh took her bow, which she had been carrying unstrung in one hand the whole while that they'd been following the trail of the _gerzhû_ herd. She attached the bowstring to one end, and—

"Here," said Hank, interrupting her. "Let me do that." He held out his hands.

Urdakh looked at him curiously and then handed the bow over.

Hank took a look at it. The bow appeared to have been constructed from two animal-horns, cleverly attached to a central handle of wood. Stringing it was no difficult task; as he did so, he felt out its draw-weight. "This can't be more than twenty-five, thirty pounds," he said, handing it back to Urdakh. "Kids on my planet use bows like this."

Urdakh said nothing. She drew three arrows from her quiver, nocked one of them, keeping the other two in the same hand that held her bow; and then she crept out from around the hillock, crouching low to the ground. Hank started to follow, but Urdakh motioned for him to stay put; and so he remained there, and he watched.

Urdakh stalked out across the open plain. Hank lay prone on the hill and peered after her. He could just barely make out the sight of the herd in the distance, a few hundred yards away. Urdakh stealthily crept ever-nearer, until she was within range of her hunting-bow, by which time she was just a tiny spot of white against the orange of her surroundings. Hank didn't see when she loosed her shots, and her certainly couldn't tell whether she'd managed to fell one of the beasts. But he _did_ see when she turned and waved at Hank, jumping up and down to get his attention.

Hank came out from behind the hillock and jogged after Urdakh. His bounding strides carried him high in the low gravity; Urdakh had a look of pure, flabbergasted amazement on her face when Hank covered the distance between them in no time flat.

As soon as Hank caught up with her, she let loose a string of excited sentences and tugged on his arm. She babbled happily all the while that she dragged Hank along, taking him over to the spot some hundred yards away where the herd had been standing mere moments ago. (Now they were stampeding away from the threat that was the huntress.) Hank noticed that all three of Urdakh's arrows had been spent; but Urdakh was not excitedly showing him a carcass. She was pointing at a large stain of reddish-black blood on the ground and a trail that led away from there.

"Got it," said Hank. "Deer-tracking. Let me, uh, go back and get your _bi-zhom_ , and then we can find your gator-bison."

* * *

It was more than an hour later when they finally came upon the dead _gerzhû_ , three arrows still sticking out of its flank. Hank gave a low whistle. "Nice shootin' there, Katniss."

Urdakh was still talking to Hank; she sounded positively over-the-moon with joy. Hank got the distinct impression that a kill like this was a _really_ big deal for her.

After she'd field-dressed the animal and turned it over to drain the blood, she took the rope from Hank, untied it from the three _bi-zhom_ carcasses, and tied it around the dead _gerzhû_. Then she offered the rope to Hank.

He stared. "You're kidding, right? That thing would weigh half a _ton_ on Earth." She said something, and Hank sighed and took the rope. He pulled. Yep; he could drag the animal all right, but it would be exceedingly laborious. "Well, at least my muscles won't waste away anytime soon on this planet."

As for Urdakh, she tied together the leather straps to make a makeshift rope of her own, and she reattached this to the alpha _bi-zhom_ , the one that Hank had crushed in a wrestling-match. She pulled the predator along after Hank, leaving the other two behind. Hank got the feeling that she would have just as much difficulty with her animal as he was having with his.

"One question," grumbled Hank. "How in the hell were _you_ planning on moving one of these big ol' heifers?"

* * *

They labored on through midday and into the afternoon. The burden of dragging along the two dead beasts slowed their pace considerably—not that Hank had any real idea where or how far they were going.

After the sun started to dip low in the sky, Hank spied a dark splotch on the horizon. It was drawing nearer and nearer as they hiked; eventually, he realized that Urdakh was leading him directly towards another one of those jellyfish-mushroom-tree groves. He glanced at the huntress suspiciously. Surely, as a native of this planet, she must have known how dangerous those places were, right?

Hank said as much to Urdakh, not that voicing his displeasure did any more good than getting across the general idea that he wasn't happy about something. Urdakh certainly didn't understand what Hank's problem was—not until they arrived at the grove, and she wanted to leave the dead animals where they were and go in amongst the mushroom-trees, while Hank refused to even approach them.

She pointed; she said something insistently; she tugged on Hank's arm. Hank shook his head. She asked something in an obviously questioning tone; Hank replied, "No. I don't wanna go in there. There's a big, scary monster." At the same time, he used one hand to mimic the movements of a giant crab-claw, pointed at the grove, and shook his head again.

Urdakh laughed, walked a few paces towards the grove, and beckoned for Hank to follow.

Hank swallowed. "I hope I don't regret this." He dropped the rope tied to the _gerzhû_ and went in after her.

Urdakh, he noticed, made a point to avoid the tree-things. That made sense to Hank; he did the same thing. But in the center of the grove, instead of a pathetic and stagnant little puddle of water, he discovered that Urdakh was leading him towards a beautiful, bubbling blue wellspring. It honestly looked like a pristine little slice of heaven: a real oasis.

Hank stood back a safe distance as Urdakh set down her pack and took her waterskin out. She knelt down by the spring and filled it, at the same time saying something to Hank—it sounded as if she were taunting him.

"Give me a break. The last one of these I found tried to eat me. Twice."

Urdakh motioned for Hank to come closer. He hesitated; then he inched his way up to the edge of the spring. Urdakh pointed out over the water: there, Hank saw a swarm of little black insects, like midges. Those hadn't been present at the other "oasis." Next, she cupped her hands together, dipped them into the pond, and lifted some of the water out. She made a show of sniffing at the water before offering it to Hank. He did the same.

"Huh—no almond smell. Is that how you know it's safe?"

Urdakh said something as she let the water fall away. Then she removed her cloak and waded out into the pond until she was knee-deep in the water. She started bathing her arms and face, washing off the dust and sweat and grime of a long day's hard hike.

Hank smiled wickedly. "Oh, is that what we're doing?" He quickly doffed his boots and dropped his pants. Now clad in only his skivvies, Hank gave himself a good running start at the pond…

Never before had any member of Urdakh's species heard someone cry out the English word "cannonball." The great splash that doused the huntress and soaked her so completely made its meaning abundantly clear.


	10. And Caverns Old

After leaving the grove and the wellspring, Hank and Urdakh hiked on into the evening, each dragging their respective burden of game behind them. It was tiresome work. Hank didn't know how many miles they covered with what remained of the day, but he suspected that it wasn't many. It annoyed him that he didn't have any real way to ask about where they were going or how long it would take to get there; but at least Urdakh seemed to have a destination in mind, and she apparently knew how to navigate the steppes well enough to get them there. So for the time being, Hank saved his questions and toiled to pull the _gerzhû_ carcass along behind him.

When they stopped to make camp that night, Urdakh prepared some of the _gerzhû_ for them to eat. Hank decided that gator-bison was a heck of a lot tastier than lizard-wolf, even if it didn't taste anything at all like either alligator _or_ bison. The closest thing that he could compare it to was ostrich, which he'd only tried once while on an overseas trip to do some field-work for his doctoral dissertation.

Field-work had never been Hank's forte: he was a computational linguist, not a linguistic anthropologist. Given the choice between writing a new piece of software from his comfortable office back at the university in Boulder, and living among a tribal society to study their language first-hand, there was little doubt in his mind that he'd always pick the former. But now, as night fell on an alien world, and he sat by a campfire chewing on gator-bison and watching Urdakh sharpen her knife with a stone, it occurred to Hank that the huntress was most likely bringing him to her home. Which meant, in turn, that Hank—assuming Urdakh wasn't some sort of loner or exile—was about to meet more of these aliens and thereby receive the mother of all crash-courses in first-contact anthropology.

Or maybe that would be "xenoanthropology," since he was, after all, dealing with aliens.

Well, it didn't matter what he called it. The important part was, he would have to make friends with the people on this planet if he wanted to survive. And he absolutely _had_ to survive.

After the food was eaten, and he and Urdakh had both taken some water, Hank pulled out his iPage again and stretched out on the ground by the fire. He checked the power: the percentage next to the battery icon had actually risen a few points since yesterday, so apparently the solar cells were working just fine. That was a relief. He queued up the voice-memo app and started dictating:

"This is Dr. Henry Swanson; log entry number one. So… those ruins on Mars? Guess what. They were a teleporter. Or some kind of, I don't know, wormhole-device. Maybe; I'm not sure. The point is, I'm somewhere else now. Another planet; I don't know what it's called. Unless… wait a sec." He paused the recording and looked up to find that Urdakh was staring at him curiously.

"Hey, Urdakh?"

She said something back, her eyes still fixed on Hank with a piercing gaze. The red and yellow glinted in the firelight.

Hank had an idea. He proceeded to reinitiate the word-game, first by pointing to individual stars in the night sky (he would have started with the moons if they'd been out, but they'd all set within a couple hours of midday), singling out the really bright ones and calling each of them "star" in English. That way, he hoped, he'd get across the idea that he was talking about stars in general and not asking for the names of _specific_ stars. Urdakh seemed to get the idea and gave Hank her language's word for "star."

Next, he waved his arms up at the whole of the sky in a sweeping, grandiose motion and repeated "sky" a few times. Urdakh nodded and translated that word too.

Finally, Hank knelt down, picked up a handful of dirt again, and uttered the word he'd remembered from when they'd first met, " _Urd._ " The huntress nodded again and repeated the word in an encouraging tone; then she asked Hank a question, which Hank imagined to be something like, _Where are you going with this?_ He responded by standing up, holding his arms out wide with his palms down, and motioning to everything all around them. "C'mon, what do you call _all_ this? What's your word for the world?"

She stared at Hank for several seconds, apparently mulling over his gestures and trying to interpret their meaning. Either that, or she understood the concept that Hank was asking for, but it confused her as to _why_ he would ever ask such a thing. Regardless, she eventually spoke a single word with quiet reverence in her voice: " _Urdowyr._ "

"Urdowyr," repeated Hank. "That's kinda pretty. Thanks." He sat back down again and went back to his recording. "One of the locals—there are actually people here, can you believe it? And they're _green_ —or at least, this one is. Anyway, she says that where we are right now is called 'Urdowyr.' No idea if that's her word for the plains we're on, or just plains in general, or the whole world. But I'm gonna go with calling this planet 'Urdowyr' for now, 'cause it sounds better than 'Planet Crapsack.'"

Here, Hank paused the recording and hit "playback." He was feeling mischievous and wanted to see the look on Urdakh's face when his iPage repeated his own words back to him. It took her a moment to recognize that the computer was playing Hank's voice and not more music; but once she understood what was going on, she looked at the object in awe and said something about _ten-vâh._

Hank chuckled. "Yeah, it's a pretty handy little piece of _ten-vâh_ , isn't it? Here, you try it." He set the app to record once again and angled the computer to face Urdakh. "Go on, say something."

Urdakh obliged Hank with another question. (He didn't recognize any of the words she used this time.)

"Cool. Now watch this." Hank dialed the slider back a few seconds and replayed Urdakh's question for her. That got an immediate reaction: she leapt to her feet, pointed her knife at Hank, and spat out a _very_ angry-sounding string of words.

Hank drew his iPage back to his chest and held it close. "Hey; hey! Relax, it's just a recording! It's not like it'll steal your soul or something!"

More angry words.

"Okay, okay! I won't record you anymore! Jesus, overreact much?"

Urdakh said something sharply and tucked her knife into the belt that was wound around the waist of her tunic-dress. Then she sat back on her haunches and glared at Hank, silent and grumpy.

Hank waited a full minute before cautiously starting up his log-entry again. "So… where was I? It's just after sundown on my second night here on Urdowyr. There's a lot I'd like to talk about, but I suppose I'd better get the important stuff out of the way first. Colonel Pyotr Lenkov is dead. He—he didn't make it through the teleporter. At least, not all of him." Hank paused and swallowed. He _really_ didn't like thinking about that.

"…Captain Emily Nguyen isn't here. If she was lucky, she never left Mars. And if she wasn't… well, I don't have any way of knowing whether she showed up somewhere else, or else got her atoms smeared halfway across the galaxy." Hank sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Christ, I'll bet mission control had kittens when they lost contact with the _Athena_ crew. If Emily isn't back on the ship and already heading back to Earth—hell, even if she _is_ —our pictures must be all over the news by now. Only two days and some change, and everyone I know back home thinks I'm dead. My _family_ thinks I'm dead."

That was a heavy thought, and not one that Hank was particularly eager to deal with yet. He cleared his throat and continued: "Uh, the, uh, the locals have a pretty interesting language. Verb–object–subject word order in declarative sentences; no inflections as far as I can tell, so I'd guess it's purely analytic…"

* * *

More _gerzhû_ for breakfast didn't seem to do all that much to lighten Hank's load. The massive herd-beast was just as troublesome to drag on the second day as it had been on the first. Neither did it help Hank's spirits any that Urdakh hardly spoke to him as they hiked. Apparently, she was in a mood today.

Around midday, the endless scenery of flat plans and orange moss was finally broken up by another speck on the horizon. As the afternoon wore on, Hank realized two things about this landmark. Firstly, it was too regular in shape to be another grove of mushroom-trees or any kind of natural rock-formation. It might have been one building or several, but there were definitely _structures_ out there. Secondly, Urdakh was not leading him _to_ the structure or structures. Their course would take them near to that place, but if they kept on moving in the same direction they were heading now, they would eventually pass it by.

Ultimately, this didn't concern Hank overmuch. To be sure, he was intensely curious about any buildings that might be out there; but he figured that Urdakh knew what she was doing, and if she didn't intend to visit _those_ particular buildings, she must have had a good reason for it.

Hours later, they came as close to the buildings as their present heading was going to take them. The sun was at their backs; the buildings were on their right-hand side, due south from their position, less than half a mile away in Hank's estimation. Urdakh seemed to be exceptionally wary now, as if being so close to those structures was cause for fear.

Hank, though… he was torn.

They were close enough now that the human could make out some specific features. It was a ruin, that much was certain: there were huge stone buildings, and pillars, and fallen rubble. By all indications, the place appeared to be completely deserted. What really caught Hank's attention, though, was the fact that some of the toppled stones had a hexagonal profile—just like the ruins on Mars.

That settled the matter for Hank. As soon as he noticed that particular detail, he turned ninety degrees and started heading south, still dragging the _gerzhû_ carcass along.

The moment Urdakh saw this, she let out a shriek of alarm and cried out Hank's name.

Hank turned and faced her. "I'm going. I _need_ to go see what's there."

Urdakh answered with a long digression—it was clear from the quaver in her voice that she was terrified of _something_ —although Hank really only caught a couple of words that she repeated a few times, _tlû-akh_ (which he'd heard before but couldn't place) and _veshûl_ (that one was new).

"Look," said Hank between grunts of exertion, "I'm the only one of us—who can move this buffalo—right? So, if you want it—you'd better come with."

Urdakh got the message and followed after Hank; but it was plain as day that she was _not_ happy about it.

* * *

Hank felt an eerie sense of déjà vu as they walked among the ruins. They looked so much like the structures at the Malea Planum on Mars; in fact, the only thing that was missing (and this disappointed the human to no end) was an enormous central ziggurat. Because _of course_ it couldn't be that easy.

Urdakh picked her way carefully after Hank, hesitating at every turn, jumping at every small sound and shadow. Being in this place had her very much on edge. If she spoke at all, it was only to whisper.

Eventually, they came to a building that was larger than all of the others, one that had no windows, and no visible entrances or exits. It was no grand temple, that much was certain, but it did appear to be the ruins' main structure.

"This has got to be it," said Hank. He dropped the rope tied to the _gerzhû_ and took out his iPage. Urdakh likewise left the alpha _bi-zhom_ next to the other carcass—so that she could string her hunting-bow and have an arrow nocked and ready.

Wild-eyed and wary, Urdakh kept watch. At the same time, Hank started pacing his way around the perimeter of the building—until, at last, he found what he was looking for. "Here we are!" he exclaimed. One section of the eroded stone wall had rows of markings on it, still visible: alien writing. Hank scanned them into his iPage and allowed several minutes for his translation algorithms to go to work. Then he dialed up the speaker-volume to maximum and played the resulting music.

Urdakh gaped in utter shock as that section of the wall slowly fell away, accompanied by the sound of stone grinding on stone.

Hank faced her and grinned wide. "Come on. Let's you and me do a little dungeon-delving."

* * *

Hank let out a sigh of relief when they crossed the threshold into the building and the door didn't immediately slam shut behind them. That was a stroke of good fortune. Hank once again rolled his iPage into a cylinder-shape, screen out, so that he could use it as makeshift torch. It didn't work very well, but it was the best that they had.

He shined the light around the chamber. It was maybe ten meters square; stone-walled and mostly featureless, except that in the middle of the room there lay another one of those six-limbed, egg-shaped, silver robots. It was completely inert, with all of its legs splayed out wide on the floor. "Hey, check it out," said Hank. He crossed the room and kicked at the fallen machine. "Dead robot."

Urdakh whispered something nervously. Hank caught the word " _veshûl_ " again.

"Take a look at this," he replied, shining his light closer to the chamber's far wall. "Side-passage. I'm gonna go see what's over there. You stay put." He motioned for Urdakh to remain in the entry-hall; she seemed all too happy to do just that.

* * *

Hank crept down the passageway alone. Along both sides of the corridor were a number of metal doors with panels set next to them in the walls. Whenever Hank so much as brushed a hand across one of the panels, the accompanying door would slide open with a _hiss_. But the first several rooms that he opened were nothing more than small cells that contained only sets of double bunk-beds, sized to fit beings that were more than two meters tall and probably significantly skinnier than humans. A cursory search of each of these cells turned up nothing interesting: there were no bodies, no discarded artifacts or possessions of any sort. Hank was starting to get the impression that he was exploring a spartan alien barracks, long-abandoned.

Near the end of the passage, he came to a couple of larger doorways: these opened into what looked like a mess-hall and a latrine. He ignored these for the moment and explored to the end of the hallway, where he found what looked like a heavy blast-door. He tried the panel; this door groaned and screeched as it opened.

On the other side was an elevator-shaft going down; but it was empty, with no sign of a lift-car or cables. As Hank shined his light over the lip of the shaft, he discovered that it was actually caved in, completely blocked off by fallen rubble a short way down. There would be no going down there, not without a major feat of engineering to clear it out first. _Well, crap,_ he thought. _End of the line._

He backtracked through the last two rooms, briefly searching the latrine first. There wasn't much to do in there except test the toilets. Touching a panel next to one of them, Hank was surprised when it actually flushed. _At least something here still works._

In the mess hall, all he found were some (disturbingly tall) tables and seats, and another door that apparently led to a kitchen and larder. It was here that he finally discovered something that the ruins' former occupants had left behind: a flat metal slab, rectangular, about 200 by 50 by 10 centimeters in volume, with a control-panel on one end. The moment Hank touched this panel, the object sprang to life—by levitating off the ground, where it hovered in place, perfectly level, at about chest-height relative to Hank.

"Hey, cool," he said to himself. "Boba Fett had one of these."

* * *

Urdakh started when Hank reappeared, pushing along the levitating slab. It floated easily, needing only a gentle nudge from Hank to move it. "Check this out," he said. "Found a hover-gurney. I know, I know, it's more _Tenser's floating disk_ than Marty McFly, but it's still useful." To drive his point home, he tapped the top of the gurney and said, " _Gerzhû_. We can use this to carry the _gerzhû_."

Urdakh nodded; she understood. " _Ten-vâh ko-tlû-akh,_ " she said.

Hank shook his head and smiled ruefully. "I cannot wait to find out what that means."


	11. Point Reflection

Thurza of the Vale-Clan had lived her entire life burdened by expectations. As a woman, it was expected that she would take up women's work and become a gardener or a seamstress or (if she had the wits for it) an apothecary. As the daughter of the clan-chief, it was expected that she would marry well and in doing so bring peace and wealth to the Vale-Folk. And as Clan-Chief Krongar's _eldest_ child, it was expected that she would comport herself at all times with honor, decorum, and above all, filial obedience. To do otherwise would set a horrible example, not just for her younger siblings, but for the whole clan.

And the unity of the clan was paramount. Especially in dangerous times like these.

That was why Thurza was so overjoyed to have taken a _gerzhû_ ; and a large, fat female at that. It was perfect. It would feed the families of the Vale, and it would win her accolades and prestige. There was absolutely no way that Thurza's father could find fault with her for this—or blame her for her defiance.

Chief Krongar had flatly forbidden her from becoming a warrior; despite all her skill, her talent, her deep desire. So Thurza would simply be a hunter instead. Her father hadn't expressly disallowed that, not yet. But now? Let him just _try_ and call it "improper" and "unwomanly" in front of fifty hungry mouths that hadn't tasted fresh _gerzhû_ in nearly half a star-cycle! It would make him seem like a hard-headed old fool.

And it was all possible because of the Stranger: the queer-looking, manlike thing that called itself a "hank."

At first, Thurza had been afraid that she'd encountered one of the fearsome _gûlgh_ , the demons of the night that haunted the ruined Houses of the Ancients—and the nightmares of children everywhere. Just like the _gûlgh_ in the old tales, the hank was unnaturally pale and walked with a stiff and graceless gait. But it soon became clear to Thurza that this battered, burned, and bloodied creature was a mortal being and no demon of legend. In the stories, the _gûlgh_ were swift and silent killers; whereas the hank was friendly enough, eager to make himself useful even, and obviously in desperate need.

It seemed to Thurza that the Stranger, this hank, must have been a traveler from some far-off land who had run into a spot of bad luck out on the Khâkoziri Steppes and lost all of his supplies. To be sure, Thurza had never heard of any race of beings called "hanks" before. Perhaps they dwelt in a land so distant that no urdakh had ever set foot there. Regardless, it was clear now to Thurza that the hanks were indeed a whole race of people—that the Stranger was not merely some freakish and deformed urdakh—because he had shown her an image of a little hankish toddler on his Magic Scroll.

Given the apparent differences between them, it was as plain to see as the ridges on Thurza's brow that the hanks and the urdakh were two separate species. No urdakh had the hank's sickly pale-pink complexion; or his flat and babyish face, with its smooth nose and forehead, laughably tiny fangs, and utter absence of proper tusks. Why, hanks didn't even have any claws! Just to look at him, Thruza never would have guessed that the Stranger possessed such formidable strength and stamina.

And yet, there was no denying the fact: the Stranger was freakishly strong. Stronger than even the brawniest male from any of the nearby clans. He had lifted three _bi-zhom_ at once, including a pack-leader, like they were nothing. He had dragged a full-grown female _gerzhû_ across the Khâkoziri, without even needing to rest all that much, for literally thousands and thousands of paces. Thurza had never dreamed that such a thing was possible.

Yes, she had come out onto the steppes to hunt the _gerzhû_. But she had assumed that she would only be able to bring back the head as a trophy, and perhaps a quarter of the beast for food. Instead, the spirits had smiled upon her, and she had crossed paths with the Stranger.

The Stranger… who, it seemed, was now asking her to commit a sacrilege and ride upon the Ancients' Magic Floating Shelf alongside the two animal carcasses.

* * *

After leaving the House of the Ancients (that the hank had somehow opened with the power of his Magic Scroll), he and Thurza had gotten to work lifting the two dead animals up onto the Magic Shelf and lashing them in place with ropes and thongs. Once the two carcasses were secured, the Stranger gave the Shelf a gentle nudge and then grinned with childlike glee as the impressive piece of Ancient Magic went gliding weightlessly across the level ground for several paces.

The Stranger smiled and said something to Thurza in that rapidly-flowing, sing-song language of his: " _Dju-stlai-k'nerhaki-puhk!_ " Then he scratched at the scruff of yellow stubble on his chin and laughed heartily.

"Yes, I'm sure this is all great fun for you, hank," said Thurza, her voice tinged with worry. "But we really should leave this accursed place—now!"

The hank responded by gesturing at the Magic Shelf and patting an empty spot on the top of it, just in front of where the game was tied down. Then he pointed at Thurza and motioned for her to climb aboard.

"I will do no such thing!" exclaimed Thurza. She spoke with the air of a chieftain's daughter whose final word would _not_ be countermanded. It was sinful enough that they were using Ancient Magic to haul their game; but she refused to commit further blasphemy by riding atop the artifact herself. The spirits might forgive the former due to necessity and circumstances; but doing the latter, Thurza suspected, would test their largess.

The Stranger shrugged, sang something in a disappointed tone, and turned to push the Magic Shelf ahead of himself—as casually as if it were an ordinary hand-cart. Then he stopped, gibbered something else at Thurza, and offered her a seat on the Shelf again.

"I said no!"

More words from the hank. Whatever he was saying, he looked and sounded so earnest—innocent, even.

For some reason, that only served to annoy Thurza further. "You certainly do like the sound of your own voice, don't you?" She brushed past the Stranger and took the lead, guiding him away from the Great House and back along the route they'd taken before, back through the ruined City of Ancients. "Besides," she added with a haughty sniff, "you don't know where we're going. How could I lead the way if I didn't walk ahead of you?"

They wended their way past heaps of rubble and great fallen stones. As the Stranger pushed the Floating Shelf and followed behind Thurza, he said something else and laughed again. His voice was rich and deep. Thurza remarked that as long as she wasn't looking at his smooth and childlike face, she could almost imagine that he _was_ urdakh after all. Not one of the Vale-Folk, or any of the other clans she knew; but perhaps a foreign man from some other tribe of urdakh altogether.

She could _almost_ imagine that—but not quite.

* * *

Thurza had to admit, the use of this newfound Ancient Magic sped their journey considerably. The Floating Shelf somehow always remained perfectly level and at a fixed, constant height, without any wobbling or jostling, regardless of whether the ground underneath it was flat or bumpy, hard rock or loose dirt, bare earth or thick with _khaz_ moss. The Stranger pushed it along apparently without effort; in fact, he seemed to find it _fun_. From time to time, he would suddenly give the artifact a mighty shove, just to watch it glide off in utter defiance of the concept of friction, and then go bounding after it with his great leaping strides. Or he would push the Floating Shelf faster and faster, building momentum, and then leap aboard and wave cheekily as he sailed past Thurza at speeds that frankly frightened her. Then she would have to go sprinting after the hank and the Magic Shelf just to catch up with them.

It was tiresome.

By the time night fell and they made camp—their third time camping together—Thurza was beyond weary. Apparently, hanks could walk all day long with only infrequent stops. And since all of their burdens now rode upon the Magic Shelf—including Thurza's knapsack and the Stranger's Magic Scroll, which he had for some reason unfurled and placed face-down atop the _gerzhû_ carcass—that was precisely what they had done with the rest of the day. They had walked. In fact, they had covered enough distance that Thurza estimated they were now only one full day's travel away from the Vale, provided they kept this pace up tomorrow.

That would be a challenge, given how tired Thurza was. Her legs and feet ached something fierce. In all honesty, she was tempted to take the Stranger up on his offer and ride upon the Magic Shelf the next day, even at the risk of insulting the spirits of the Ancients.

As before, they built a fire, took some food, and shared some of the water that remained in Thurza's waterskin. "No need to be stingy with it," she said to the Stranger. "We'll pass another watering-hole and two streams on the way home tomorrow."

The hank nestled down by the campfire and said something in a somber tone before taking out his Magic Scroll. He spoke to it for a while in a clear voice, his words slow and steady, just as he had done the night before. Then he once again made the Scroll repeat back some of what he had said, in a perfect imitation of the hank's own voice. That still disturbed Thurza greatly: to let a piece of Ancient Magic capture your voice like that. What if it decided to get greedy and take their voices permanently? Magic could sometimes be fickle and dangerous that way. Once the Stranger was done, Thurza suppressed a shudder and said to him, "Do what you want, as long as you don't use that thing on _me_ again."

The hank responded by commanding the Magic Scroll to conjure forth its ghost-music. Thurza hadn't known what to make of those wails and howls at first, but once she'd picked out the sounds of drums and twanging strings, she had eventually come to recognize that it _was_ in fact music. There was a certain pleasing rhythm to it, even if the melodies sounded grating, and the singing was positively awful, incomprehensible babble. Listening to the "music" seemed to keep the Stranger calm, though, so she endured it with all the tact and aplomb that befit a chieftain's daughter.

For a third night in a row, Thurza found herself spending a lot of time that evening staring at the Stranger, watching his peculiar antics, and wondering about his origins. "Where on Urdowyr do you come from, hank?" She would ask questions like this from time to time, and the hank would look up from his Scroll and answer her with a stream of rapid words. Sometimes, he would ask his own questions, and Thurza could only wish that she knew what he was saying.

In the back of her mind, Thurza was troubled by a notion that she didn't yet care to voice aloud, something that wouldn't become an immediate concern until late in the day tomorrow: _When we get back to the Vale, what is the clan going to do with you?_

* * *

When they broke camp the next morning, Thurza watched as the Stranger touched a particular spot on the side of the Magic Shelf; this made it come alive and hover up off the ground once again. (He had done something similar to the artifact last night which had caused it to slowly sink to the ground, where it had rested, motionless, all night long.) "I must admit," said Thurza, "you hanks sure seem to know what you're doing when it comes to the Magic of the Ancients."

The hank responded by once again offering Thurza a seat on the Magic Shelf. He sounded… insistent. " _K'mon,_ urdakh, _a-la-bord!_ "

"Oh, all right!" She relented and climbed atop the artifact. "But if the spirits strike us down for our arrogance, I'm blaming you, hank." She seated herself at the "bow" of the Magic Shelf and let her legs dangle down in front of it.

The Stranger, meanwhile, once again perched his Magic Scroll on top of the _gerzhû_ carcass. This made Thurza curious. She pointed at it and asked, "Why do you do that?"

The Stranger regarded Thurza pensively for a moment before also pointing at the Scroll and saying, in passable but badly-accented Vale-Speech, "Eat." Then he pointed up at the sun, and back to the Scroll again, and said, "Magic eats the sun."

"I'm impressed," said Thurza (in a tone that suggested the exact opposite). "You've almost graduated to complete sentences. Even if they don't make the least bit of sense."

The Stranger answered by giving Thurza a wicked grin—and giving the Magic Shelf a heroic shove. Thurza let out a whoop of surprise: she was almost knocked over by the momentum. As she sailed away from the Stranger, she heard him laugh and utter a phrase that sounded to her ears like, " _Îzzi-pîzzi-pai_!"

* * *

The Stranger managed to keep up a brisk jog for a little while, at first. Thurza found it rather exhilarating, to glide over the plains astride the smooth-sailing artifact while her new companion, the hank, labored to push it along. It gave Thurza the chance to rest her aching limbs, and as she rested, her mind wandered off in silly, romantic directions that she would have been too embarrassed to speak of if she had been at all worried that the Stranger could understand her.

"I feel like a princess riding a river-barge to the City of Kings!" she said with a giggle. "Or—I don't know; what would be an even more childish flight-of-fancy? How about a _sea-captain_ , like in the _really_ old stories, from the Time of Oceans!" She turned and rested on her side, so that she could face the Stranger as she rambled. "Have you heard the old tales about oceans, hank? They say there used to be waters in the world even more vast and empty than these steppes!"

The stranger said something back. From the sound of his voice, Thurza suspected that he was getting cranky again.

"Oh, don't be like that! Just… think of oceans, and dream of what Urdowyr must have been like when the Ancients ruled it." She settled into a cross-legged position at the front of the Floating Shelf and once again faced forward. "You know, my mother would be so cross with me if she could hear me talking like this. 'You're not a little girl anymore, Thurza. Time to worry about growing up and being a wife.'" She snorted and looked over her shoulder at the Stranger again. "Do you know that I've seen twenty-three storm-seasons, and I've still not been claimed yet? Oh well; thank the spirits for small favors, I suppose."

By this time, the Stranger had slowed his pace to a steady walk, and now the ride wasn't quite so thrilling anymore. He was also doing some rambling of his own, chatting away about the-spirits-only-knew-what. Or maybe he was complaining about something; Thurza couldn't tell, and she was only half-interested.

She focused her attention on navigation, on keeping an eye out for those few and vital landmarks that would guide them across the endless expanse that was the Khâkoziri, and using these to make sure that the hank was pushing them in the right direction.

Thurza knew that even at this reduced speed, provided they didn't run into any unexpected trouble, they would reach the Vale by nightfall.


	12. The Calm Before

It was nearly evening when Thurza and the Stranger finally came to the edge of the endless, mossy expanse that was the Khâkoziri Steppe. The flat plains gave way to low, gently rolling hills that were covered in tall prairie-grasses the color of charcoal. A broad, winding river broke up the landscape here, its waters silty and placid; and far off on the other side of the deep river-valley that cut the countryside in twain, they could just make out the gray shadows of the distant Ghâranuwi Forest in the deepening twilight.

Reeds and flowers (both in a variety of colors) grew along the riverbank; insects with three sets of gossamer wings flitted between the waters and the plants. In sharp contrast with the unbroken stillness of the steppes, these water-insects gave off a constant droning buzz that somehow made the river-country seem infinitely livelier—a buzz that was occasionally punctuated by the call of some other small creature, like the chirps of the leather-winged _den-veh_ that nested in the low branches and in the tops of saplings on the far bank; or the infrequently-heard croaks of the _chêh_ that hopped along the waterside, hidden in the reeds (those were difficult to snare, but tasty in a stew if you could manage it).

As Thurza led her new companion along the high bluffs that overlooked the river, she noticed that he was marveling at everything he saw. She chuckled at this and said, "Is it really all so strange to you, Stranger? You must come from somewhere _very_ far-away indeed!"

The hank said something in his foreign, flowing speech. He sounded almost… wistful. Nostalgic, even.

"Then again, perhaps it reminds you of your home, and you miss wherever it is that you come from. Is that it?" In that moment, Thurza wished dearly that she and the Stranger could understand one another. It would have made everything so much easier.

They had turned north to follow the river. Thurza was now well-rested enough that she no longer needed to ride atop the Ancient Device that carried along their game and other belongings for them. Instead, she walked alongside the Stranger, who seemed content to push the Floating Shelf ahead of them and keep to a reasonable pace. Now that there were more new things to point out—a river, reeds, flowers, grasses, animals—they resumed the pastime of exchanging their respective languages' words for them; and of course, with each new word, the Stranger would do _something_ that Thurza didn't understand to the glowing surface of his Magic Scroll. She presumed that he was somehow using it to record the words that he learned; but he wasn't writing upon it the way the River-Traders did with their clay tablets and papyri. Regardless of how exactly it worked, Thurza at least understood that the Scroll was helping him to learn her language—although this did little to alleviate the frustration she felt at being limited to discussing solid objects that she could physically point out to him. So far, the number of abstract concepts that they'd been able to trade words for was distressingly small.

Without words like that, there was no way that they could hold a proper conversation—and Thurza truly wished to converse with the Stranger. She had questions about him and about where he'd come from: many questions. As he, no doubt, had for her.

* * *

Eventually, the pair came to the lip of a grassy dell that gradually widened out into a sweeping valley, carpeted in wildflowers with cup-shaped petals of muted yellow and green. This was the Vale: the home of Thruza and all her clan. At the bottom of the Vale, the river curved into an oxbow; and here at the water's hairpin turn sat the semi-permanent encampment of the Vale-Folk. It was mostly a collection of hide yurts, except for two more permanent buildings: the wooden longhouse, where the chieftain—Krongar, Thruza's father—oversaw clan business; and the partially stone-walled forge, where Old Takhun the bronzesmith worked.

Laying eyes on that part of the camp again gave Thurza an idea. "Takhun is the oldest in the clan, except for Grandmother Ânza," she said to the Stranger. "And he's the only one of us who's ever done much traveling. Maybe he's heard of hanks before? Though he's certainly never mentioned anything like you in any of his stories…"

The Stranger said something and pointed down at the little hamlet.

"Yes, that's my home. The home of the Vale-Clan. What are your people's clans and tribes like, I wonder?"

The Stranger answered by repeating the words "home" and "Vale-Clan" in a thoughtful tone.

Thurza sighed and stopped them from descending any further into the valley. "Now comes the part that you're not going to like." While the Stranger watched, she undid one of the leather straps holding the _bi-zhom_ carcass down atop the Floating Shelf. Then she pointed at the hank and crossed her arms at the wrists, indicating that he should do the same.

The hank did not like this one bit. He shook his head and protested vehemently, " _Nonono-nowêiyinhel,_ urdakh! _Dhrznowêi, wîr-nâtduing-dhechubâka-thing!_ "

Even though Thurza knew full well that there was no way she could compel this unexpectedly imposing creature to tie his own hands, she had to insist. "Come on, you—you stupid hank!—be reasonable!" She tried to get the thong of leather around his wrists, but he kept batting her hands away. "You don't understand! My people will be _terrified_ by the very sight of you! Please—let me do this!"

It took a great deal more convincing and more struggling between the two of them, but eventually the hank relented and allowed his hands to be bound. "Please," said Thurza again. "Please understand! It _has_ to be this way. We have no choice!"

The Stranger grumbled something angrily and started marching down into the Vale on his own, leaving Thurza to follow after him and to push the Magic Shelf with the _gerzhû_ and _bi-zhom_ carcasses herself.

* * *

Ûrghat was the watchman on duty that evening. A young warrior-in-training of only fifteen moon-cycles, he didn't command nearly as much respect within the clan as he would have liked. The other warriors, the hunters, and even the women, they all still called him "boy." He _hated_ that.

The desire to be seen as a grownup—as a man—did little to stave off the boredom, or to force Ûrghat to pay more attention to his duties. There was never anything interesting about the night watch. To be sure, the old men of the clan whispered of rumors and far-off wars; but did anything exciting ever happen in the Vale? No; of course not. Ûrghat figured that he'd be lucky enough to spot a fat little _chêh_ hopping among the wildflowers, something that he could chase down, spear, and roast for his supper. Beyond that, the evening was shaping up to be as dull as ever.

At least, that was the case right up until he spotted the chieftain's daughter, Thurza, returning to the encampment—alongside some Ancient Floating Contraption and a nightmarish-looking captive, a manlike creature with pale-pink skin and unnaturally straight legs that immediately reminded Ûrghat of the demonic _gûlgh_ spoken of in children's stories. Whatever he was, that was clearly no urdakh that Thurza had somehow managed to capture and enslave.

And so Ûrghat did what any self-respecting young man would do in his position: he ran all the way back to the encampment, as fast as his legs could carry him, hollering all the way. He called for Chief Krongar, for warrior Dolgar, and for anyone else who might hear him, to come at once.

Thurza was back—and she had brought trouble with her.

* * *

The ruckus caused by Ûrghat's shouting roused practically the whole of the clan. Urdakh poked their heads out from yurts or looked up from campfires to see what the commotion was. The young watchman was calling out one name over and over again—"Thurza"—along with something about a captive _gûlgh_.

Dolgar, called by most the mightiest warrior in this or any other clan, was standing guard outside the longhouse with both hands resting on the haft of his long-spear. He was a tall and broad-shouldered urdakh male, one who still had yet to witness his fortieth storm-season, with forest-green skin and reddish-brown hair that he kept cut short, except for the bushy sideburns that grew down his cheeks. (Urdakh males grew no facial hair above their lip or on their chin, but those of a certain age did have what you or I would call "mutton-chop" beards.) When he saw Ûrghat dashing through the camp in a blind panic, he called out in his deep and commanding voice, "Whoa, whoa, slow down, boy. Catch your breath and speak plainly."

Ûrghat doubled over and sucked in several heaving breaths before he could speak again. At the same time, Chief Krongar and Ŷgron the hunter emerged from the longhouse, curious about the commotion.

Ŷgron was not pleased by the interruption. "Krongar, we still have much to discuss—"

The gray-bearded old chieftain held up a hand and cut the hunter off. "It can wait, Ŷgron. Now, lad, what's all this about?"

"It's—it's Thurza, sir," said Ûrghat between gasps of breath. "She's back—and she's captured a real live _gûlgh_!"

"Don't be ridiculous," said Ŷgron with a sneer. "The _gûlgh_ are just an old wives' tale."

"Hmph. Old Takhun would disagree with you," said Dolgar dryly.

"That's enough," said Krongar. "Both of you, come with me. We'll get to the bottom of this." He left it unsaid that he was immensely relieved by the news of Thurza's safe return—and immensely annoyed that he'd have to give her _yet another_ severe talking-to for running off into the wild yonder without having bothered to tell anybody beforehand.

* * *

Thurza and the Stranger waited at the edge of the encampment. A small crowd of Thurza's fellow Vale-Folk—most especially children—had already formed to gawk at the oddities that the chieftain's daughter had brought back with her. (The children and the grown urdakh men wore only simple reptile-hide skirts, while the urdakh women were covered from shoulder to knees by form-fitting tunic-dresses.) They all seemed more than a little put off by the Stranger's queer appearance—to say nothing of the Magical Floating Platform bearing the game that Thurza had felled—and they kept themselves back at a safe distance.

The hank said something to Thurza just then, and she noticed that he was still addressing her by her race's name, calling her "urdakh." "Well, that simply will not do," she muttered. "Not anymore." Until now, Thurza had been reluctant to share her name with a stranger, as any right-minded urdakh would be. After all, you never knew with outsiders: there was no way to tell whether or not a person you'd never met before wasn't secretly a sorcerer or a conjurer; and if you gave your name out too freely, that was a good way to wind up hexed. But by now, she was pretty sure that this Stranger was no evil sorcerer, and so she decided to make a proper introduction by pointing at herself and saying, "No-no-no, not 'urdakh.' Thurza. _Thurza._ My name is _Thurza._ "

The Stranger stared at her in uncomprehending confusion, until she got a new idea. She pointed at herself again and said, "Urdakh"; and then she pointed at the people in the assembled crowd, indicating each of them one-by-one and again saying, "Urdakh, urdakh, urdakh." Finally, she pointed at the Stranger and said, "Hank."

At this point, the Stranger performed a gesture that Thurza had never seen before: with his hands still bound together loosely at the wrists, he let his face fall into his open palm, and he muttered something that sounded like, " _Oi-guh-valt, ai-geddit-nau._ "

He looked up and imitated Thurza's brilliant idea from a few seconds ago, pointing at her and to the crowd, saying, "Urdakh, urdakh, urdakh, urdakh—" at each individual; and then pointing to himself and saying, " _Hyu-min. Hyu-min._ "

Now it was Thurza's turn to be confused. She scrunched up her face and said, "You're a 'human'? But if you're a 'human,' what's a 'hank'?"

The Stranger chuckled and alternately pointed between Thurza and himself. "Thurza. Hank. Thurza. Hank."

She gasped when she understood. "Your _name_ is Hank! Oh, well; now I just feel foolish."

The Stranger—Hank—at least had the decency to look mortified as he mumbled something to himself that probably had to do with his having called Thurza nothing but "urdakh" for the last few days. Then he attempted a bit of Vale-Speech: he pointed at himself and said, "Your name is Hank," and back at Thurza, "My name is Thurza."

Thurza rolled her eyes. "No, no, human; you've got it backwards. _Your_ name is Hank, _my_ name is Thurza—"

They were cut off by the timely arrival of Chief Krongar and the two men accompanying him, Dolgar the warrior and Ŷgron the hunter. The chieftain folded his arms across his broad, bare chest; he looked at his daughter with stone-faced disapproval. "Thurza. What in the names of all the spirits have you gone and done this time?"

Thurza faced her father, gave a formal half-bow, and said, "Greetings, Father. I've been away on the hunt. I took a _gerzhû_ —a female, fully-grown." There was no hiding the pride in her voice.

"And a _bi-zhom_ ," said Ŷgron, coming closer to inspect the game. "A pack-mother, by the looks of it. That's… actually rather impressive." (To Thurza, the hunter sounded more perplexed than impressed—as if it were simply inconceivable that she'd managed such feats of hunting prowess.)

Krongar, meanwhile, had his eyes closed and his head bowed. His face was a darker shade of green now—because he was _seething_. "On the hunt," he echoed, holding back rage. He looked up and caught Thurza in the eye. "Daughter, what were you _thinking_!?"

"Father, I—"

But Krongar wasn't done. "Obviously, you weren't thinking!" he roared. "Or don't you remember how your mother died!?"

Thurza glared, defiant. "Of course I do! _Her_ only mistake was—"

"Was being where a woman had _no business_ being!" finished Krongar. His voice took on a dangerous edge. "Hear me, Daughter: it was high time you learned your duty to this clan! You are _not_ to leave the camp without my permission again. Am I understood?"

"Father—!"

" _Am I understood!?_ "

Cowed, Thurza averted her eyes—but her voice was icy. "Yes, Father."

Krongar nodded. "Very well. Now tell me about this—this outlander. Ûrghat called it a _gûlgh_ , and looking at it, I'm inclined to agree with him."

"If it _is_ a _gûlgh_ , we're all in grave danger," said Dolgar. The big warrior was normally stoic and unflappable, but now he eyed the "outlander" warily, his every muscle tensed and ready.

Hank chose this moment to speak up. " _Dhrz-dhat_ 'goolg' _wur-da-gyin_ ," said the human, eyeballing the chief and then the warrior. " _Aishur-dontlaik-dhesaun-duvvit._ "

"He's not a _gûlgh_!" insisted Thurza. "He says that he's a 'human' named Hank. He's—he's not dangerous. I think that he's a traveler who got lost on the steppes."

"Oh?" said Dolgar, quirking an eyebrow. "And is that why you've tied his hands?"

"He let me tie them," said Thurza. "As a precaution."

Ŷgron eyed the human with suspicion. "How very… neighborly."

Thurza ignored the hunter's remark and pled with her father. "I want to take him to Old Takhun and see if he knows anything about humans."

Chief Krongar stroked his chin and answered by waving an arm at the Floating Platform bearing the game-animals. "That piece of Ancient Magic—it belongs to the human?"

Thurza nodded—but she wasn't about to admit that she'd helped Hank plunder one of the Houses of the Ancients. "Yes. It's his. He, um, he also possesses a Magic Scroll that makes music—of a sort."

"And are either of these magical devices dangerous?" asked Krongar.

"…Not from what I've seen so far," said Thurza. "But… I can't be sure."

Krongar gave a nod and rendered his decision. "All right. Ŷgron, you take my daughter's 'trophies' to the hunters' hut for butchering."

Ŷgron balked. "But—what about our unfinished business—?"

"It can wait for later!" snapped Krongar. "Now do what I say! And Dolgar, you take the outlander to the smithy, see what Takhun makes of him. Keep a close watch on this 'human' at all times."

Dolgar nodded. "As you wish." He leveled his spear and prodded at Hank, who babbled something and danced back to avoid the spearhead. "Move," said Dolgar, and he frog-marched the human into the encampment.

Ŷgron, meanwhile, was hesitant to involve himself with Ancient Magic. He walked around the Floating Platform several times before cautiously hefting the _bi-zhom_ carcass into his arms. The weight of the pack-alpha nearly caused his legs to buckle. He strained to carry it into the camp; and as he went, he shouted an order to the crowd of onlookers, calling on his fellow hunters to quit standing around and staring like a bunch of lazy fools, and to get to work moving the much larger _gerzhû_. Half a dozen male urdakh of varying ages all scrambled to do Ŷgron's bidding.

Once both Dolgar and Ŷgron were out of earshot, and the crowd was either following them or dispersing back into the camp, Chief Krongar turned to Thurza and said, "And as for you, Daughter, you need to come with me to the longhouse. We have matters to discuss."

Thurza folded her arms and narrowed her eyes. "Like what?"

"Like Ŷgron, for one thing," said the chief. "Just before you returned, he asked to claim you. He wants you for his wife." Krongar watched Thurza carefully, gauging her reaction with the eye of a lifelong politician.

As for Thurza, she was stunned. " _Ŷgron_!? But he's—he's such a—" she stopped herself from saying something unseemly, and opened and closed her mouth several times before finding her voice again. "You're right, Father. It would be best if we talked about this inside." Without another word, she marched past Krongar and headed for the longhouse.

As the red sun set and several torches were lit throughout the camp, the chieftain sighed. _Well,_ he thought, _that answers that question. Hopefully, she'll take the news of her betrothal better than her mother did._


	13. When the Three Brothers

Ŷgron suppressed a shudder as he struggled to carry the slain predator into the hunters' hut. He recalled the outlander's appearance; it made his stomach turn. It was disturbing: all pale-pink and tuskless, like a sickly, discolored baby, grotesquely stretched out to adult proportions. Those freakish stick-legs, the smooth forehead… disgusting. How a beauty like Thurza could even stand to be near that thing, he couldn't fathom.

He crossed the threshold into the hut and dropped the _bi-zhom_ carcass onto a wooden block. "Then again," he said quietly to himself, "perhaps that could work in my favor…"

"What could?" asked Rôh the trapper, who had followed Ŷgron into the hut. Rôh was a wiry slip of a male who preferred to spend his time setting snares for small game right here in the safety of the Vale, rarely venturing far like the hunters did. When he wasn't out checking his traps or lingering in Ŷgron's shadow like a lackey, he sought to perfect the fine art of idleness. Case in point: the several hunters who had labored to drag Thurza's big female _gerzhû_ into the camp had made do without Rôh's help. Rôh had _supervised_ ; nobody had been surprised.

Those hunters now came into the hut and retrieved the various tools they'd need to begin butchering and processing the animals: hatchets and knives and saws, most of bronze, some of obsidian. Soon they would skin and quarter both beasts, prepare the meat for salting and smoking, collect and render the fat, and save what bones they would for tools or carvings or trophies.

Ŷgron mostly ignored them and replied to his sidekick, "The creature. The _gûlgh_ -ish outlander. Surely, now that Thurza has laid eyes on something that ugly, she'll be overjoyed to learn that I've pressed suit with her father!"

"Oh, well sure," said Rôh with an easygoing shrug. "Even _I'd_ look good next to that freak. Doubtless, the next time Thurza gets a good look at the likes of you, she'll be all swoons and blushes."

It was no secret that Ŷgron was considered by most—chief among them, Ŷgron himself—to be the best-looking male in the clan, unattached or otherwise. He was quite certain that his handsome and well-proportioned features, broad physique, and powerful, calloused hunter's hands were the envy of his fellows and the object of every female's desire. He could have had any woman that he wanted in all the Vale-Clan, perhaps even in all the tribe; but he had spurned every advance, biding his time, showing a hunter's patience. Only a chieftain's daughter would be worthy; only a chieftain's daughter would win him the respect he deserved. To that end, Ŷgron had done everything in his power to catch Thurza's eye. He boasted of his deeds; he displayed his trophies; he cared for his appearance, keeping his hair and beard meticulously groomed and wearing only the finest _shârva_ -skin skirts.

"Thurza, swoon? Thurza, blush? Not her," said Ŷgron with a chuckle. "Though I'd trade my best knife just to see that. She's… formidable, no question."

Rôh looked around at the other hunters, busy at work, chatting amongst themselves. "The girl can hunt, that's for certain," he said. "When was the last time _you_ brought in a _gerzhû_ this big?"

Ŷgron glared, and the rest of the hut fell silent. For whatever reason, only Rôh could ever manage to get away with a sly needling such as that. Anybody else would have been picking their own bloody teeth up off the floor.

But before Ŷgron could say what he was thinking—that once Thurza was his wife, he would put an end to all her wild nonsense—the hunter who had been skinning the _bi-zhom_ pack-mother got his attention. "Ŷgron, look at this!" he said. "This hide is flawless! There—aren't any wounds!"

That was shocking. "No wounds?" echoed Ŷgron. He took the hide and examined it: sure enough, there was no sign anywhere that it had ever been pierced by arrow or spear. "Then… how in the name of the Spirit Realm did it die!?"

The hunter pointed at the remainder of the carcass and said, "Look here. Its neck was crushed."

Rôh peered close to confirm, and he and Ŷgron shared a worried look. As the other hunter said, this beast's spine had been crushed—not just broken, but _pulverized_. Perhaps a fall from a great height could have done that; only, there were no such heights to be found out on the Khâkoziri Steppe. It was a mystery, and none were more troubled by it than Ŷgron.

* * *

The interior of the Vale-Clan longhouse was not comfortable. It was a formal place for meetings and discussions, not a living-space. Most of the floor was bare, with the long wooden planks only interrupted by the presence of the huge, rectangular fire-pit in the middle of the chamber. A ceremonial stone bowl and several idols of bone and wood representing the various spirits and ancestors of the clan sat near one end of the pit. At the far side of the longhouse, opposite the cramped entryway, a huge tree-stump had been carved into the shape of a great chair and covered over with feathered _shârva_ -pelts; this was the chieftain's seat. Above it, spears and wooden masks (the latter used only during rituals of the gravest import) decorated the wall. Strategically-places holes in the roof admitted sunlight and, when the fire-pit was in use, drew away the smoke.

Thurza waited at the door of the longhouse for her father to catch up with her. Once Chief Krongar arrived and went inside, she deferentially followed him in. He took his seat; she took her place at his side, kneeling down on a scaly _gerzhû_ -hide that had been spread out next to the throne for that purpose.

Chief Krongar opened the discussion. "I take it that you are not pleased with Ŷgron," he rumbled.

"No, Father," said Thurza. "I will not have him."

"You have another choice," said Krongar. "I have not spoken of this before now because—because I wanted to give you time, to arrive at your own decision. To perhaps choose a husband from among our own folk."

"What do you mean, Father?"

Krongar sighed and shut his eyes. "It was sixteen moon-cycles ago. During the last Clan-Moot. Chief Garhâd of the Forest-Clan wished to secure a bride for his young son, Velroth. I promised to give him _you_."

Thurza blinked. "I am _betrothed_? I have been betrothed… since I was _seven_!?"

Krongar nodded. "It was a good match. You and Velroth are about the same age; and we have been on friendly terms with the Forest-Clan for countless generations."

Thurza was stunned. Something about this didn't add up. "But, then, why has this Velroth never come to claim me?"

Krongar bit the inside of his cheek and looked away. After a moment, he answered, "The Hill-Clan." That was all he really needed to say; Thurza understood his meaning perfectly. Hill-Clan, Vale-Clan, Forest-Clan: they all belonged to the same tribe; followed similar ways; spoke similar tongues. But the urdakh of the Hill-Clan were an order of magnitude more warlike than their fellow tribesmen. It was possible that they were even more bellicose than any urdakh clan or tribe had been since the days of the Great Horde, that long-ago time when _all_ the tribes had come together to raid and pillage the Northern Kingdoms. The Tûlarkhag Hills sat on the opposite side of the Ghâranuwi Forest, very far away from the Vale; and while the Hill-Clan and the Forest-Clan were not precisely at war with one another, it was a plain fact that they had long shared an open hostility which resulted in violent skirmishes more often than not.

Thurza folded her arms and glowered. "So, what, this forest-prince has been too busy defending his clan's borders to bother coming back for little me?"

"He's not a prince, Daughter," said Krongar with a roll of his eyes. "He's a chieftain's son; his station his equal to your own. And, yes; I can only assume that Velroth hasn't come for you because he's been busy. The Hill-Folk acting up; the Clanless turning more and more to banditry; all this talk of war brewing in the north. You know as well as I what news the River-Clan brings."

Thurza scoffed. "Even if that were the case—" But she was interrupted when Ŷgron barged into the longhouse. It was considered terribly impolite to enter the clan's meeting-space without announcing oneself first, but when Chief Krongar heard what Ŷgron had to say, curiosity overcame him, and he let the transgression slide.

"How did you kill the _bi-zhom_?" Ŷgron asked of Thurza.

"I didn't," came her simple answer. "The _gerzhû_ is my trophy; the _bi-zhom_ is the human's." She turned to her father and explained, "He killed it with his hands."

Krongar's eyes widened. "I thought you said this outlander wasn't dangerous!"

"Oh, make no mistake," said Thurza. "Hank is at least as strong as three of our men, maybe four. He just… doesn't strike me as a violent person, that's all."

"How do you mean?" asked Ŷgron, who was still trying to process the idea that the scrawny, baby-faced freak out there might possibly be as strong as four strapping urdakh males.

"Well, he doesn't carry himself like a warrior at all. Or like a hunter. I think… I think that he might have been a bard among his own people."

A _bard_ with the strength of four men? Krongar was worried, and it showed. "Well," he said haltingly, "we'll… we'll just have to give it some time, and… see what Takhun and Ânza have to say on the matter." He cleared his throat and quickly changed the subject. "In the meanwhile, Ŷgron, I'm glad you're here. We have much to discuss."

Ŷgron eagerly seated himself cross-legged at the foot of the chieftain's place. "Have you spoken of my claim to Thurza, then?"

"I have," said Krongar.

"And what is your decision?" asked Ŷgron with baited breath.

"The decision," said Krongar, "is Thurza's." He faced her and spoke in a formal tone: "My Daughter, you have been claimed by two suitors: Ŷgron of the Vale-Clan, our mightiest hunter; and Velroth of the Forest-Clan, the son of their chief." As he spoke, Krongar watched Ŷgron out of the corner of his eye, and he saw the hunter's face fall. "These are the names of the men who have sought you for a bride. Whom do you choose?"

Thurza was careful to keep her expression neutral, but inside she was smiling. She was going to enjoy this. "The choices before me are a chieftain's son, who I have never met, and who would carry me away from the Vale that I love, to live in the woods, where I have been but seldom; and Ŷgron, the bravest, handsomest, richest man in our whole clan?"

Krongar nodded. "Whom do you choose?" he said again.

Thurza looked Ŷgron in the eye and answered, "I'll take my chances with the forest-prince."

Ŷgron was almost too crestfallen to be furious. Almost. "But—but—how can _that_ be your decision!?" He looked from Thruza to Krongar, his face twisted in a mingling of confusion and rage. "What claim does this Velroth have that could possibly surpass mine!? I have been—"

Krongar waved a hand and cut him off. "Velroth holds the prior claim. His father made the arrangement with me when Velroth and Thurza were children. Thurza has spoken; her word is final. Do I make myself clear, Ŷgron?"

In that instant, Ŷgron knew that he was defeated. There was no law or custom in all the clans that he might use to countermand Krongar's pronouncement. "You are clear, Chieftain," he growled.

"Good," said Krongar. "Now that that's been settled, I want your opinion on an important matter."

Ŷgron was still fuming; he said nothing, but he nodded his assent.

Krongar began, "With all this talk of war in foreign lands, I believe it would be prudent for us to remove ourselves from the Vale for a time."

Thurza was surprised. While the Vale-Folk were technically nomads, they had only left the Vale once before that she could recall, when she was very small. "Where will we go?"

"The redoubt at Dâkhin's Canyon," said Krongar. "The fortifications there haven't been used in a generation at least and are no doubt in need of many repairs. But first, I want to hear what Ŷgron has to say. I'd like to move the Clan soon—at least a couple of tendays before the Three Brothers align. Does our mightiest hunter think we have enough stores to last through the storm-season?"

The Three Brothers were Urdowyr's three moons—blue Tzêl, green Chûn, and silver Zêyum. They came into an alignment a little more frequently than every third star-cycle, with a star-cycle being just shy of a hundred days. If you didn't keep careful count of the days, the only way you could tell that a star-cycle had passed was by tracking the subtle changes in where the stars rose and set relative to well-known landmarks on the horizon. But the passage of another moon-cycle was impossible to miss: the alignment of the Three Brothers heralded the storm-season, which brought ceaseless rains during the day and blizzards all throughout the night. The urdakh counted their ages in moon-cycles, which was to say, in the number of storm-seasons that one had lived through.

"I believe so, yes," answered Ŷgron after some thought. "We would have to do all of our hunting in the forest for as long as we remain there, but the steppes are best avoided during the storm-season anyhow. Unless we meet with misfortune as we travel, I foresee no trouble."

"Good," said Krongar, stroking his beard. "That's good. I'll speak to Dolgar next, to organize our defenses for the journey. You may go, Ŷgron."

Upon realizing that he had just been dismissed, the hunter looked as if he wanted to argue—to explode into a verbal back-and-forth with the chieftain that would no doubt end only in failure and censure. Ŷgron's sense of propriety compelled him to remain silent and preserve what dignity he had left. With a curt nod, he rose and exited the longhouse.

Krongar turned to Thurza once again. "And what will you do now, Daughter?"

"I believe I shall go see what Takhun has to say about the human," she replied.

"Hmph. We must decide what to do with him." Suddenly weary, Krongar leaned back in his chair. He thought for a moment and then said, "Once you've spoken with Old Takhun, have Dolgar bring the human here. If he's as strong as you say, we can make him carry things at the very least."

Thurza had a sneaking suspicion that such menial work would be a severe under-utilization of Hank's true capabilities; but she kept this to herself for the time being. She rose, politely bowed her head, and then left the longhouse and headed toward the smithy.


	14. Strength of One

Dolgar put up his spear and led the human by the arm toward the smithy. "This way, outlander."

Hank was looking this way and that, taking everything in. He seemed like such a curious creature, with his eerie, white eyes held open wide and reflecting the flickering light of the encampment's several open fires. Now that it was after sundown, the urdakh that they passed were mostly finishing up with their day's labors, putting aside their tools or gathering up basketfuls of foodstuffs and other products. With the storm-season approaching, the harvest was in full swing, and many of the urdakh had spent the day either working in the small garden-plots just outside of the camp; or preserving what they had hunted and gathered, leaching nuts and sun-drying vegetables, smoking jerky and pounding pemmican. But now, families gathered themselves around the cooking-fires or small stone hearths which were located out in front of most of the encampment's yurts. This was where they would converse, swap stories, sing songs, and share the evening meal.

Hank drew many curious stares from these urdakh as Dolgar hastened to usher him along. A small but growing band of exceptionally curious children, some of them so young that their tusks still hadn't quite come in on their lower jaws, followed behind the pair at a safe distance. To Dolgar, the human appeared to be delighted by everything he saw, no matter how mundane. As they neared the smithy, Hank flashed the big warrior a toothy smile and babbled, " _Dhissplêssizza-mêyhzing, aifîl-laikaim-plêying-helderskrôlzzêy-tinvîyar-ruhgyehn!_ "

Dolgar ignored this incomprehensible nonsense and pulled Hank over to Takhun's modest bronze-works, where a semicircular wall of stone and mud, and several cut beams, propped up a slanted roof of bundled sticks. There were all manner of tools scattered haphazardly about the smithy, seemingly with no organizational principle at all: some for shaping stone into molds, others for smelting copper and tin, and still others for the casting of molten bronze. At the moment, Old Takhun himself was bent over a nearly-finished stone mold, expertly chipping away with mallet and chisel. This aged urdakh male was nearly as tall as Dolgar, but not nearly so broad in the shoulders. His face was lined with wrinkles, and his long, frazzled hair and sideburns were snow-white.

"Hey, old man," said Dolgar as he approached. "At your age, you should be retiring for the night. Why are you still working?"

Takhun took the warrior's dry teasing in stride; he didn't look up from his work. "Krongar says we need ax-heads. So, I am making a new mold for ax-heads." The chieftain had requested the production of several woodcutter's axes; for what purpose, Takhun didn't yet know. But he knew the difference between a war-ax and one meant for wood-splitting. The former had to be light, the head thin, so that you could attack or parry without throwing yourself off-balance. The latter required more heft and a wedge-shaped profile, which meant removing more stone to make a deeper mold.

"Well put that down for a moment," said Dolgar. "Krongar wants you to take a look at this."

Takhun set down his hammer and chisel, took off his leather gloves, and used those to brush the dust off his _gerzhû_ -hide apron. Then he looked up, spotted Hank standing next to Dolgar, and jumped in fright. "What in the Shadow Realm is _that_!?" he cried.

Dolgar looked askance at the human. Hank was now casually wandering around the smithy, peering at all of Takhun's instruments and equipment, while at the same time working to untie the knotted leather strap keeping his wrists bound together. "He claims to be something called a 'human,'" said Dolgar with a hint of worry evident in his voice, "but I want to know if he's a _gûlgh_."

Takhun came out from behind his worktable—he walked with a pronounced limp, favoring his left leg—and hobbled up to Hank, so that he could get a good look at the outlander by the dim light of the smithy's tallow-burning lamp. It only took a moment for the old smith to arrive at a conclusion. "This is no _gûlgh_ ," said Takhun with finality.

Hank, meanwhile, had finished shrugging off his loosened bonds and now gave the smithy a friendly wave. " _Hai_ ," he said; then, switching to Vale-Speech, "your name is Hank!"

Takhun raised a bushy eyebrow and shot Dolgar a funny look; Dolgar cleared his throat and said, "I believe that 'Hank' here is still learning our tongue. How do you know that he's not _gûlgh_?"

"The eyes are all wrong," said Takhun. "This fellow's eyes are white-and-blue. _Gûlgh_ eyes are solid black. Empty. Something I'll never forget the sight of, for as long as I live."

Dolgar nodded. Everyone in the clan knew the story, though it was hard to say how many actually believed it. Old Takhun claimed that a _gûlgh_ was responsible for his lame leg: that as a youth, he had been the sole survivor of a doomed hunting-party, and that all of his fellows had been slaughtered with ease during a chance encounter with a roving demon-of-the-night. Takhun himself had been merely left for dead, a stroke of luck beyond reckoning—and, ever since that fateful day, a damned good reason to be afraid of the dark.

"Well if he's not _gûlgh_ , then I suppose we have no cause to doubt his word," said Dolgar with a thoughtful stroke of the hair on his cheeks. "That being the case, have you ever heard of humans before?"

"Can't say that I have," admitted Takhun. "But then again, it's been many a moon-cycle since I last walked the streets of the City of Kings. Maybe times have changed?"

"Times are certainly _changing_ , of that there can be no doubt," said Dolgar, leaning on his upright spear-haft. "The River-Traders talk of pirates and bandits—and whisper of war. Someday soon, you—" Dolgar stopped mid-sentence when he saw what Hank was doing.

The human had been poking around the bronze-works, examining tools, taking a close look at some of the finished pieces that Takhun had wrought. But now he had in his hands a huge stone mold meant for the casting of several spear-heads at once. Ordinarily, it would have taken two strong urdakh men just to lift that stone, and here Hank was casually turning it over in his hands, inspecting the craftsmanship. " _Dhissizzkûl._ "

"By all the Sky-Spirits…" whispered Takhun.

It was then that Hank noticed both urdakh staring at him. He quickly put down the mold and sheepishly said, " _Sâri-maibæd._ "

Takhun and Dolgar shared a look. "What do you suppose that means?" asked Takhun.

Dolgar shook his head. "I have no idea." By this time, Hank was already bored again and messing with something else, peering into a large kiln that sat at the end of the curved stone wall just outside the smithy. _By the Spirits_ , thought Dolgar, _this is like watching after a child. A child stronger than any of our warriors! Come to think of it, this could mean trouble…_

* * *

Thurza arrived at the smithy and came upon a most peculiar sight. Takhun and Dolgar were standing there, just outside the bronze-works, watching dumbfounded as Hank played games with a small crowd of urdakh children. Two of the kids were perched upon the human's shoulders and another clung to his back—he didn't seem to mind the weight at all. He had a stick in one hand, and he was scratching markings into the ground; from time to time, one of the children would take the stick from Hank, make a mark, and pass it back to the human.

Thurza, hands clasped behind her back, walked over to where Doglar and Takhun were standing and asked, "What's going on here?"

Still baffled, Dolgar answered, "One of the children—Tlêla's girl, I think—just walked up to the human and—and asked for a ride. Somehow, he knew what she wanted, and put her up on his shoulders. Then—then _this_ happened," he finished, waving a hand at the scene before them.

Thurza glanced down at the markings scratched into the dirt. They were difficult to make out in the firelight. She peered closer: there were several three-by-three grids made from two pairs of intersecting lines; some of the spaces were blank, while others were filled in with a cross or a circle. "What's all this?" she asked.

"Not sure," said Takhun. "But the children think it's a game. I don't know how it works, but they seem to have figured it out all right."

Thurza turned to Takhun and asked, "Have you ever heard of humans before? Is there anything you can tell us about Hank, or his people, or where he's from?"

Takhun shrugged and scratched at his long, shaggy beard. "I'm sorry to say, I haven't, and I can't. This outlander is as strange to me as he is to any of us. Quite the mystery…"

Unable to hide her disappointment, Thurza sighed. "Perhaps Grandmother Ânza will know something… oh, but that will have to wait. Dolgar, my father has asked for you again. We're to bring the human and decide what's to be done with him."

"Very well," said Dolgar. He and Thurza then set themselves to prying the clinging children away from Hank and setting them safely down on solid ground.

* * *

Back at the longhouse, Thurza and Dolgar announced themselves at the doorway and then brought Hank inside with them. Hank's keen eyes took in every sight: the fire burning in the long pit; the idols, spears, and masks; and, of course, Chief Krongar seated on his wooden throne. Hank occasionally spoke under his breath, saying things to himself in his own language—observational comments that none of the urdakh were privy to. His eyes narrowed when Thurza sat down on a hide blanket at Krongar's right hand; and then suddenly Dolgar was leading him across the room to stand before the chieftain.

Dolgar seated himself on the floor at Krongar's feet and motioned for Hank to do the same. Hank plopped down, pointed at himself, and said, "Hank Swanson." Then he held his hand out to Krongar and looked at the chieftain expectantly.

Krongar stared at Hank's proffered hand, mildly irritated. He turned to Thurza and said, "You've spent some time with this outlander. Does he mean to offer me insult, or his services as a warrior?"

Thurza remembered Hank making the same gesture back when they'd first met. "I believe it might just be a greeting among his tribe. Here, let me—" She reached out and put her hand over Hank's, gently pushing his arm back down. Then she pointed at her father and said, "Krongar," and at the warrior, "Dolgar."

Hank quietly repeated both names to himself, committing them to memory. Then he looked up at the chieftain and said—well, he said a whole _lot_ of words, but there was really no following him at all—before looking away and sighing in frustration.

"This much, at least, is clear to me," said Dolgar. "We cannot know what the human wants with us if we cannot speak with him. We must instruct him in the Vale-Tongue."

"Either that, or we can wait until next we see the River-Clan," said Krongar. "Assuming Nârhig still captains a barge, he'll most likely have his Talkstone with him."

Thurza brightened considerably upon hearing that. "Oh, of course! I'd forgotten all about Nârhig's magic! It works so well, you always forget that he's using it."

Krongar nodded and gave a wordless grunt of agreement. "Mm. True enough; but I don't expect that we'll see the Traders again until after the storm-season passes. In the meantime, I suppose we'll have to do what we can to get the human speaking our language."

"I can handle that," said Thurza. She shot her father a poignant look and added, "Since you have, after all, confined me to the encampment."

Krongar didn't rise to the bait. "Very well; during the day, the human can be _your_ responsibility. He'll earn his keep around the camp doing whatever anyone asks of him; and you'll teach him enough of the Vale-Speech that he understands his duties—and his station. Is this agreeable?"

Thurza nodded. "It is, Father."

Krongar leaned back in his chair and tapped the claw of his forefinger against the wood of the armrest. "Then that just leaves the matter of where we'll stash the human at night. I assume he does sleep?"

"Yes, Father," Thurza giggled.

Dolgar spoke up then: "Ûrghat recently moved out of his parents' yurt and into a tent of his own. There should be room enough for the human in there. Plus," he added wryly, "I think it will do the boy some good to face his fears head-on."

"Hmph," snorted Krongar, "I think you just want one of your warriors to have eyes on this outlander at all times! And I don't disagree. It's a good idea."

"That's settled, then," said Dolgar. "The human can bunk with Ûrghat. Is there anything more we need to discuss?"

"Indeed, there is," said Dolgar. "We're going to weather the upcoming storm-season at Dâkhin's Canyon."

Dolgar knew what that meant: an arduous overland journey of several days, burdened by the clan's entire population and all its possessions; followed by the laborious renewal of some very dilapidated fortifications. While Krongar and Dolgar got down to the nitty-gritty of planning for the journey, Thurza excused herself and took Hank to meet with his new bunk-mate.

* * *

Most urdakh families slept together inside a single yurt, but it wasn't uncommon for youths from relatively large or wealthy families to establish themselves in a separate, semi-temporary dwelling. Thurza shared a tent with her younger sister, Dzêla; it sat next to the large yurt occupied by Chief Krongar and his third and youngest child, a little boy called Burûl. It was a privilege accorded to the two young women because of their father's status; had Krongar not been the clan-chieftain, they almost certainly wouldn't have been able to afford a tent to call their own.

Ûrghat had been living on his own for less than a star-cycle; needless to say, he was not happy at the prospect of giving up his privacy and sharing his small dwelling with the human. He protested—in fact, over the course of the following days, he complained incessantly—but he ultimately relented to Krongar's order and did his best to put up with the situation. Thurza supposed that Ûrghat was, at least at first, equal parts annoyed with and terrified of Hank's presence. She figured that as time passed, Ûrghat would get used to Hank; and she lamented that as Hank mastered the Vale-Speech, his ignorance would protect him from Ûrghat's whingeing less and less.

As time passed and the days rolled into a tenday, Hank settled into his role among the Vale-Folk as everybody's least-liked and most-used pack-mule. He carried things for people; he fetched things for people; he drew water—lots and lots and _lots_ of water, all day, everyday—from the river. If there was something that Hank could not carry himself, he used the Ancient Floating Table to help him carry it. He developed a distinct appreciation, as only a linguist could, for the Yiddish-derived verb, _to schlep._ And speaking of language: he learned. He strove every day to learn more and more of the Vale-Speech (or _Vennîj_ , as it was properly called), to take in new words and to hopefully master the terse complexities of Vale-Folk grammar.

Hank also took care to observe a particular custom that doubtless had the Vale-Folk scratching their heads and wondering at human peculiarity: every morning, and also every evening, no matter how hard he'd labored that day, Hank worked out. He ran laps around the encampment. He found boulders—heavy ones, rocks that no urdakh would have dared try to move—and he lifted them routinely. He used reps and sets to practice his counting in Vennîj. As determined as he was to learn the local language, Hank was even more determined to maintain his health—to stave off the loss of muscle-mass and bone-density that would inevitably come from his merely continuing to live under low-gravity conditions.

He had to: if he slacked off and let his body adapt itself to Urdowyr, returning to Earth might very well become impossible.

So Hank kept his hope, and he kept his determination, and he kept up his exercise routine. And one morning, more than a tenday after Hank's arrival in the Vale, Thurza followed him out of the camp to observe his workout and ask about it.

* * *

Thurza had been speaking with her friend Nalâkh. Nalâkh was a weaver and a seamstress, only two storm-seasons older than Thurza. The pair had been inseparable since childhood, first as playmates, then as boon companions. Nalâkh was as quiet as Thurza was outspoken, as meek as her friend was bold. She didn't consider herself to be as pretty as Thurza (not that she'd ever say such a thing aloud and thereby come off as the jealous type), but she did pride herself on being an accomplished craftswoman and a sensible person. Thurza could chase horizons; Nalâkh preferred to dispense practical advice.

On this particular morning, Nalâkh had only just learned of Ŷgron's marriage-suit and Thurza's rejection of the hunter. They were sitting around a cooking-fire, sharing a frumenty of boiled grain and fruit for breakfast, which they ate from carved wooden bowls. Nalâkh simply couldn't help herself; she looked as if she wanted to burst, until finally she did: "You should have married Ŷgron!" she chided.

"I don't like Ŷgron," came Thurza's bored reply.

"What's not to like?" pressed Nalâkh. "He's handsome, he's an even better hunter than you are—"

"That's debatable."

Starry-eyed, Nalâkh clutched her bowl close to her chest and said, "Why, you could have been hunting-partners together! It would have been so romantic…"

"Hardly," said Thurza. "Ŷgron doesn't have a romantic bone in his body. And I don't want to talk about him." A moment of awkward silence passed as they ate. Then Thurza asked, "What's brought this on?"

Nalâkh pouted. "The women are gossiping that you've been betrothed to a chieftain's son from another clan!"

"So? I'm a chieftain's daughter. Something like this was bound to happen… sooner or later." Thurza sighed. The truth be told, she was less than thrilled by this development; but, like she'd told her father, she was willing to take her chances. Anyone was better than Ŷgron in her eyes.

"But… that means you'll have to leave the Vale! Leave all of us! …Leave me."

Thurza nodded. "I suppose so. It's not like I want to, Nalâkh, but I don't really have a choice."

"You _did_ have a choice," said Nalâkh. "You _do_. You could still choose Ŷgron."

"Never," said Thurza. "Not if he offered me a… a palace in the City of Kings! If you like that lout so much, why don't _you_ marry him?"

Nalâkh looked away and blushed. "Oh, I couldn't—that is, I mean—he—he isn't—"

Before Thurza could parse her friend's stammering, Hank suddenly jogged by on his way out of the encampment. The way the human ran was so off-putting: he almost seemed to float by with his powerful, springing strides. As he sailed past the two women, he gave them a wave and a friendly smile.

"There goes the outlander, off to pick up rocks and put them back down again," said Nalâkh. "He is just so very… odd."

"Yes, he is," said Thurza. "But he's also useful." With that, she set down her bowl, got up, and went after Hank.

* * *

It didn't take Thurza long to catch up with the human. She found him a few hundred paces away from the camp, downriver, lifting his boulders, loudly grunting and counting as he did so. She came up beside Hank and greeted him. "Hello, Hank."

"Hello, Thurza," said Hank, setting down the huge rock. "You need?"

"No." Thurza sat herself down on the ground and pointed at the boulders. "Why?"

Hank sat down on one of the rocks and considered the question. He scratched at the scruff of yellow hair that grew on his face—it was on its way to becoming a proper beard now—and finally said, "I'm strong. Yes?"

Thurza couldn't quite tell whether he was asking for confirmation of the statement itself or of its grammar, but either way, he had spoken truly. "Yes," she said with a nod.

"Strong," said Hank again, "at little time. Carry rock, make at big time."

Thurza almost gave into frustration before she finally figured out what Hank was saying. She corrected his vocabulary first—"for a short time" and "for a long time"—which made Hank nod and whisper the proper words to himself several times, in a bid to internalize this new bit of subtlety. Then she considered the implications of what the human had been trying to say. Hank was strong… but only for a short time? His strength was temporary? She wondered if it wasn't perhaps the result of a potion or some kind of charm. Truly, Hank's people must have had powerful witch-doctors indeed, if they could create medicine like that. Certainly, her own clan's shamaness, Grandmother Ânza, couldn't perform a such miracles; otherwise, every warrior in the Vale and in all the surrounding clans would have been lining up to take advantage of it.

In any event, Ânza was the real reason that Thurza had sought out Hank this morning. She stood up and said, "Come. Get your Magic. We're going."

Hank was intrigued. "Where?"

Thurza pointed off into the distance and said, "Back out onto the Khâkoziri Steppe. We need to gather herbs—get plants—for Grandmother Ânza. I need your Magic Shelf."

Hank nodded. He had only understood about half of all that Thurza had just said, but he at least gathered that they were going on an excursion of some kind. That suited Hank just fine: he figured that he was just about due for another change of scenery, and it might be nice to get away from his new job as the whole of the Vale-Clan's personal errand-boy for a while.


End file.
